I am sick of themeparks with no life to them. I want to kill who I want, have no guidance, steal everything, go to jail, get killed and de level or be punished for it, experience the world, hunt, and maybe even think on my own. I hate quests, if you have quests it means that your game is so bad you have to give people a point to move forward. Quests should be goals made by the characters because they want something. Make the rewards for exploring and hunting and trading and everything more interesting and you wont need quests. Quests are a crutch, themeparks a disease, and mmo players the catalyst to it all.
Auction House. Probably the single largest social killer of any themepark concept.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
I can't stand quests, quest hubs or anything quest driven/related.
10 years of my mmorpg life has been comprised of M59, UO, EQ1, AC1 and DAoC, and I think i ran a grand total of 40 quests between all of them. These games lasted me a long time! I play Wurm these days and love that it's not quest driven.
Quest driven games never last for me. The more story-like or movie-like they become, the more I dislike the game.
You know, you don't have to quest, even in the quest-heavy games, right?
I mean, those muds, the earliest mmos--what's a quest? Grind is the name of the game. Only game in town, actually.
Yeah, i know i don't have to quest in a quest heavy game. But when a game is questdriven and the entire game is quest hub to quest hub, and the content that i am paying for is quest after quest... it's pretty pointless for me to continue playing. Some folks love it, I'm not knocking it aside from stating what commonly accepted mmo concepts bug me. if a game is 75% quest driven, that's 75% of the content that bugs me... who wants to play that?
Give me an open world with open dungeons and a heavy grind any day
Things that make me wonder "Why would I even do this?"
If I'm some evil powerful magic-hurling person, why would I want to deliver your love letter to someone who is always standing just down the road from you?
Why would I want to kill those woodland creatures?
Why should I travel to a different star system so you can pay me tens of thousands of credits to fetch for you some cigarettes? Just buy a new damn pack in the station you're at, dumbass!
Why should I collect sludge samples. I have no interest in sludge. I don't want to touch your sludge. You're not even going to give me anything I want for doing this. But a percent on my map will go up leading me ever closer to getting a magical chest to appear from nowhere when I 100% it giving me some coin to throw down a well, that I never will because I quit GW2.
Maybe I just want to go over there, and see what is beyond that gate. Maybe climbing that mountain would be fun. Perhaps honing my craft in creating the best leatherwork in the area is more my style. But I can't do any of that because unlocking the gate requires killing exactly 10 rats for every person who needs to go through, but only once. How the guard keeps track I have no idea. I can't climb that mountain because when I get too close there is some sort of invisible magic wall preventing me from getting even a step closer. And I can't hope to do leatherwork because anyone who wants to do it can and be a master at it in a day's time, and everyone selling the same exact leatherwork has undercut each other on a broker market that magically spans the planet.
That raiding is always the focus of endgame and PVP is largely ignored. Also, allowing high level players to hang out lowbie ganking without any real penalty.
Currently playing: Rift Played: SWToR, Aion,EQ, Dark Age of Camelot World of Warcraft, AoC
01) Cash Shops. Nothing brings me back into the real world like a cash shop.
02) A group of monsters standing around. One gets shot at. Only that ONE comes after the attacker.
03) Tanks that "taunt" monsters into attacking them when they don't even speak the same language.
04) Dragons that lower themselves into being a mount for some tiny player character they could eat whole in one bite.
05) As some have mentioned before, animals that drop gear. A coin or two I can see them swallowing, but plate mail and greatswords?
06) Monsters that use weapons and armor that you do not get to loot when they die. They just... vanish...
07) Crafting systems where you cannot break down items, especially those you have crafted, into raw materials.
08) Action combat. Everyone's a black belt in jujitsu, it seems. Or highly acrobatic in their armor.
09) Being able to run, full speed, for endless hours in full gear with multiple backpacks loaded with kilotons worth of loot.
10) Sneaking in full sunlight with no cover or shadows nearby.
11) Time does not matter. You get a quest to save someone's kidnapped daughter. Three weeks later you decide to clear the quest and go save her. There she is, all fine and dandy. Monsters are the same in an area day or night.
12) Seasons don't happen. You can harvest food anytime of the year. Zones don't change with the seasons.
13) Instanced dungeons.
I better stop. I could go on
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
subscriptions - they are nothing more than a rip off. My cell phone is a rip off, my cable bill is a rip off, my internet service is a rip off. I don't need to add another rip off to the list.
raiding/gear grind - because we can't make content extensive enough to keep people happy for a long period, lets make it so they can only play once a week.
raiding/gear grind on P2P games - lets charge them monthly to play content once a week, so it takes them a year to get all the pretend items they want. Then after that, we'll release an expansion so that all the stuff they gained becomes useless and they have to start over.
15/month is cheap - yeah, lets make it sound like the developers are doing us a favor by charging $15 each month, after all, it's cheaper than some other waste of money.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
A wolf in one zone has 100,000 HP, but in the first zone the same sized wolf had 22.
I'm the hero, and everyone else in my raid group, and all the other [Max level] characters, and that gold farmer spamming trade chat has the same quests to save the world once and for all.
I may be the savior of the world, but that NPC thinks I have enough time to collect apples for her.
What about collecting apples and talking to her gave me XP? How does that make me stronger? Why can't she just give me more XP to be nice? Why can't I, the savior of the world, have the mystical power the level 2 NPC has to grant XP?
When an expansion comes, it replaces all existing content for current and future players.
I can afford a diamond sword enchanted to +8 dexterity, but I am homeless (Only applies to some games).
That NPC will wait for years for me to get around returning her apples, and still reward me the same.
I'm pretty sure that rat was naked. If I found these pants from that, I'm not too sure I want to wear them after considering the places it could have been stored.
Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Raid.
I'm wearing armor; I'm not god. Why am I taking a smack from a dragon twenty times my size and not dying on the spot?
Why do the NPCs tell me to press M to open up my minimap? They're in the game, why do they know what 'M' is?
That there are games being released with a watered down experience that is given better by a single player RPG or ARPG that are being called MMORPGs. That it's ok that they've devolved into something the original vision wasn't meant to be, but that's ok because we have epics now!
I would like the return of the experience that only MMO's can provide. Not a single player RPG or ARPG...but with a chat box!
Played: EQ1 (10 Years), Guild Wars, Rift, TERA Tried: EQ2, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes of Magic and countless others... Currently Playing: GW2
I was a long term EQ player and have played a lot of other MMO's. I hate questing like in Rift and WoW so on. In EQ you have to look or talk to people. I love that in EQ so many people help you. I hate that questing is so laid out. I also hate that a monster 100x my size can stomp me 100 times but if I get healed I live.
mmos keep coming with new ideas to test your patience, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, when you are, already trying hard enough to like them. I call this one: negative reinforcement. They not only give you less options, they apply you a whole lot of annoying limitations and not so trivial needs and constantly remind you of all of them, almost every feature that the game has to offer is modified so you can feel the difference.
Small world, quest markers, fast leveling, lifeless npc's, dumb mobs, quests not being real quests eg: kill 10 rats when it should be like a mini adventure etc. Pretty much anything that is in todays mmorpgs. Oh and f2p when you really have to pay to play the game how it was meant to be played like what SOE has done to their games as an example.
5) Class specific weapons and gear. As if a human mage could not pick up a sword if she had to.
That one at least makes some sense... In P&P games you can use a sword but the chanse you hit in combat is really low. The idea behind that is that becoming good in melee combat with weapons like that takes a lot of work, which the mage instead are using for studying books and making magical experiements.
If a MMO used chanses to hit like P&P games you can easily have a similar system, but for some reason all attacks in MMOs always hit (some of them just dont do any actual damage). I am actually surprised no MMO ever tried something like this.
My list:
Daily quests. The most boring MMO idea ever, minimum work for the devs for the time people spend doing them.
"Smart" stupid bosses. One would assume that a drgon or similar ultra smart boss would fight smarter than a animal, like dont falling for taunts, change tactics when the players clearly dominate him and so on. And FFS use the powerful magical item he drops.
Taunts. They makes combat far too predictable and stupid.
Too many identical skills. In games like EQ2 you have tons of attack skills but most of them are more or less the same, and I am not talking about the skills you upgrade. My swashie rotated 30 or so skills but they were in fact less than 10 different skills, the rest were the same with a slight difference in damage and animation. It adds nothing to the game besides some more fastkeybars.
Worthless crafting. In a certain game I was forced making about 100 tin greatswords to level my crafting a little to the next reciepe. I couldnt give away that crap for free and I swear that the npc vendor smirked at me while I trashed them. It is not so hard to make what you need for crafting a bit harder to get and at least only force me to make 1 of each the useless unsellable crap if you must have them in at all. Crafting in MMOs could be so fun but usually suck so much.
mmos keep coming with new ideas to test your patience, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, when you are, already trying hard enough to like them. I call this one: negative reinforcement. They not only give you less options, they apply you a whole lot of annoying limitations and not so trivial needs and constantly remind you of all of them, almost every feature that the game has to offer is modified so you can feel the difference.
small letters:
if you can't put up with it, quit or pay.
Dont forget that you get less when a game go F2P and you continue to sub for it, suddenly you still need to pay to get access to some stuff.
I dont mind F2P like PW or something, but the standard western model do indeed suck.
Not a feature of the games , but definately of the genre. "The Migration", hyping the next big thing, that new game that will give you a buzz like your first hit of MMo games, then the jaded disappointment , trolling forums and moving on to the next wow killing hype fest.
Just enjoy whats there for what it is, it wont be all things to all people.
Listing of my concepts I can not stand, in no particular order:
Raiding or Instanced PvP as the only endgame
Linearity in general but linear questing, linear progression & linear worlds are the main ones
Hand holding from character creation to level cap
Quest hub design
picking up umpteen million quests and running off and doing them in one fell swoop
fed-ex style questing
Use of zones to segragate players
Pokeman-pet-battles and other silly, juvenile and childish concepts suited to appeal to the 12 year old
The Holy Trinity of Tank/Heal/DPS...at least there should be a mandatory Crowd Control Class, Buffer and Debuffer. All 6 roles should be absolutely required if your playing a trinity based game
lack of compelling weapons for classes....Swords, Axes, Bows, Daggers and Staves are ok but we need Pole Arms, Scythes, Flails, Throwing Weapons, Atlatls, Melee Quarter Staffs, Orbs, Sceptres, Wands, Chakrams (from Reckoning), Krull style throwing blade, and everything else your imagination can think of
Classes....I want freedom to build my own class suited to my likes
Classical Bow users without the need of being a pet class
refusal to add out door game space (open and non-instanced) player housing, Guild halls and the like.
Crafting being a skill an adventurer can pick up. Crafting should be its ONLY game play style. Your either an adventurer or a crafter
Cheesy storylines where I am a hero, an MMO is about persistance and if there are thousands of other heroes then the term gets diluted to having no meaning. Players should be adventurers, crafters, politicians, traders and other roles, heroes should be relegated to the annals of a game's lore.
Vertical Progression
Class skills and abilities that are ONLY purchased from a trainer, let skills, abilties and spells be a part of a games economy.
Tiered gear that makes previous gear obsolete
Instanced Dungeons....Dungeons should be open and hostile
item specific gear...I want to see a return to Asherons Call Style random gear which can be found anywhere and on any mob.
Those are just a smidgeon I could think of within the few minutes it took me to make this post but by all means it is not an exhaustive list.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
For me ti would be the one where everyone feels they have to rush to cap asap, for endgame that serves no point since the gear you earn can't really be used for anything else worthwhile. WoW is very bad for this, the raid gear serves no real purpose after you get it since you can't go and pvp with it, nor do anything else worth doing in it. Might be fun to get it, but at the same time, I personally couldn't be bothered so I hit cap before cata came out and just quit, since I didn't see any point to the endgame wow offers. This is a personal thing though. I am thinking of subbing to everquest 2 because its like the only mmo on the market atm (that I know of) that has stuff you can do even after you get all your raid gear. Can help lower leveled chars ind ungeons you missed to gain more alternante advancement exp to make yoru char more powerful, can pvp with it. there is a ton of stuff you can do, which is something almost all mmo's after wow sadly lack.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Originally posted by dreamsofwar Auction houses. I'd much rather see Western MMO's adopt a concept that many Asian MMO's have used, player stalls. It adds to the social aspect of the game, allows for bartering, and it just adds more life and atmosphere to cities, and other parts of the world. Imagine seeing a few player stalls outside of raid entrances, its little things like that I think would make games more immersive.
Dear god NO.
Nothing is as grotesque an eyesore then having thousands of off-line people standing around anywhere they please setting up a shop.
Now I could buy this argument if it was at a players house but no, we do not need anything more to get people to clog up cities.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Listing of my concepts I can not stand, in no particular order:
Raiding or Instanced PvP as the only endgame
Linearity in general but linear questing, linear progression & linear worlds are the main ones
Hand holding from character creation to level cap
Quest hub design
picking up umpteen million quests and running off and doing them in one fell swoop
fed-ex style questing
Use of zones to segragate players
Pokeman-pet-battles and other silly, juvenile and childish concepts suited to appeal to the 12 year old
The Holy Trinity of Tank/Heal/DPS...at least there should be a mandatory Crowd Control Class, Buffer and Debuffer. All 6 roles should be absolutely required if your playing a trinity based game
lack of compelling weapons for classes....Swords, Axes, Bows, Daggers and Staves are ok but we need Pole Arms, Scythes, Flails, Throwing Weapons, Atlatls, Melee Quarter Staffs, Orbs, Sceptres, Wands, Chakrams (from Reckoning), Krull style throwing blade, and everything else your imagination can think of
Classes....I want freedom to build my own class suited to my likes
Classical Bow users without the need of being a pet class
refusal to add out door game space (open and non-instanced) player housing, Guild halls and the like.
Crafting being a skill an adventurer can pick up. Crafting should be its ONLY game play style. Your either an adventurer or a crafter
Cheesy storylines where I am a hero, an MMO is about persistance and if there are thousands of other heroes then the term gets diluted to having no meaning. Players should be adventurers, crafters, politicians, traders and other roles, heroes should be relegated to the annals of a game's lore.
Vertical Progression
Class skills and abilities that are ONLY purchased from a trainer, let skills, abilties and spells be a part of a games economy.
Tiered gear that makes previous gear obsolete
Instanced Dungeons....Dungeons should be open and hostile
item specific gear...I want to see a return to Asherons Call Style random gear which can be found anywhere and on any mob.
Those are just a smidgeon I could think of within the few minutes it took me to make this post but by all means it is not an exhaustive list.
Don't play world of warcraft or most of the other copies of it that have come out sincer 2005, since they all pretty much have all of those things you dislike in them, however I can reccomend everquest 2, since it seems to have the least amount of them. The game did get wowified a bit so it could try to compete with wow, mostly this was in the vein of adding quest hubs.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Originally posted by dreamsofwar Auction houses. I'd much rather see Western MMO's adopt a concept that many Asian MMO's have used, player stalls. It adds to the social aspect of the game, allows for bartering, and it just adds more life and atmosphere to cities, and other parts of the world. Imagine seeing a few player stalls outside of raid entrances, its little things like that I think would make games more immersive.
Dear god NO.
Nothing is as grotesque an eyesore then having thousands of off-line people standing around anywhere they please setting up a shop.
Now I could buy this argument if it was at a players house but no, we do not need anything more to get people to clog up cities.
I have to agree with Azzamasin on this one, the whole stall idea alot of asian mmo's use is just terrible, it makes it a pain in the ass to find what your looking for since none of these games have anyway to search them (only exception is ragnarok online that has a player run bot that lists the items, sellers location etc and uploads them to a searchable database). The whole stall was and still is a horrible idea. AH is also better because it helps regulate prices, in a game with stalls people price things all over the place since there is no ingame way to check what a item is worth in general without bugging people. IMO they use the stall system just because the game devs want to be lazy and not have to code a AH. Almost every town in any mmo has tons of buildings that are bascally unused in anyway cept to make the town look more full. Its not that easy to code a properlly functioning AH, but coding a stall is piss easy so they just kinda cop out.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Listing of my concepts I can not stand, in no particular order:
Raiding or Instanced PvP as the only endgame
Linearity in general but linear questing, linear progression & linear worlds are the main ones
Hand holding from character creation to level cap
Quest hub design
picking up umpteen million quests and running off and doing them in one fell swoop
fed-ex style questing
Use of zones to segragate players
Pokeman-pet-battles and other silly, juvenile and childish concepts suited to appeal to the 12 year old
The Holy Trinity of Tank/Heal/DPS...at least there should be a mandatory Crowd Control Class, Buffer and Debuffer. All 6 roles should be absolutely required if your playing a trinity based game
lack of compelling weapons for classes....Swords, Axes, Bows, Daggers and Staves are ok but we need Pole Arms, Scythes, Flails, Throwing Weapons, Atlatls, Melee Quarter Staffs, Orbs, Sceptres, Wands, Chakrams (from Reckoning), Krull style throwing blade, and everything else your imagination can think of
Classes....I want freedom to build my own class suited to my likes
Classical Bow users without the need of being a pet class
refusal to add out door game space (open and non-instanced) player housing, Guild halls and the like.
Crafting being a skill an adventurer can pick up. Crafting should be its ONLY game play style. Your either an adventurer or a crafter
Cheesy storylines where I am a hero, an MMO is about persistance and if there are thousands of other heroes then the term gets diluted to having no meaning. Players should be adventurers, crafters, politicians, traders and other roles, heroes should be relegated to the annals of a game's lore.
Vertical Progression
Class skills and abilities that are ONLY purchased from a trainer, let skills, abilties and spells be a part of a games economy.
Tiered gear that makes previous gear obsolete
Instanced Dungeons....Dungeons should be open and hostile
item specific gear...I want to see a return to Asherons Call Style random gear which can be found anywhere and on any mob.
Those are just a smidgeon I could think of within the few minutes it took me to make this post but by all means it is not an exhaustive list.
Don't play world of warcraft or most of the other copies of it that have come out sincer 2005, since they all pretty much have all of those things you dislike in them, however I can reccomend everquest 2, since it seems to have the least amount of them. The game did get wowified a bit so it could try to compete with wow, mostly this was in the vein of adding quest hubs.
Ohh I quit WoW right after Cata and trust me, I can not stand WoW clones like Rit or SWTOR. I dont mind themeparks per se, especially oens like GW2, ESO and Neverwinter because they break the WoW clone mold.
EDIT: your sig is spot on and I agree 100%
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
PVP with essentially/truly infinite deaths has always bothered me.
No consequences; no lawman nicking you off to jail if you're caught in town, no bounty hunters hunting your butt in groups, no stocks with villagers hurling fruit, no hangman, no military justice....etc. It's not even minimally "realistic", not even within the limits of the genre.
Also MMO "generals" faction leaders etc. allow their "soldiers" to operate as completely independent vigilantes, something no sane commander would ever tolerate. We have the balls to call the chaotic result a "War".
PVP is instead just an 8-bit fighting game, Street Fighter with infinite quarters.
Interesting isn't it - that a good consequences system hasn't been developed - it isn't really that hard if you concentrate some effort on it.
All of the above could be put in place without too much trouble.
Comments
Summing it all up in one word, Themeparks.
I am sick of themeparks with no life to them. I want to kill who I want, have no guidance, steal everything, go to jail, get killed and de level or be punished for it, experience the world, hunt, and maybe even think on my own. I hate quests, if you have quests it means that your game is so bad you have to give people a point to move forward. Quests should be goals made by the characters because they want something. Make the rewards for exploring and hunting and trading and everything more interesting and you wont need quests. Quests are a crutch, themeparks a disease, and mmo players the catalyst to it all.
*removes self from soapbox*
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Yeah, i know i don't have to quest in a quest heavy game. But when a game is quest driven and the entire game is quest hub to quest hub, and the content that i am paying for is quest after quest... it's pretty pointless for me to continue playing. Some folks love it, I'm not knocking it aside from stating what commonly accepted mmo concepts bug me. if a game is 75% quest driven, that's 75% of the content that bugs me... who wants to play that?
Give me an open world with open dungeons and a heavy grind any day
Things that make me wonder "Why would I even do this?"
If I'm some evil powerful magic-hurling person, why would I want to deliver your love letter to someone who is always standing just down the road from you?
Why would I want to kill those woodland creatures?
Why should I travel to a different star system so you can pay me tens of thousands of credits to fetch for you some cigarettes? Just buy a new damn pack in the station you're at, dumbass!
Why should I collect sludge samples. I have no interest in sludge. I don't want to touch your sludge. You're not even going to give me anything I want for doing this. But a percent on my map will go up leading me ever closer to getting a magical chest to appear from nowhere when I 100% it giving me some coin to throw down a well, that I never will because I quit GW2.
Maybe I just want to go over there, and see what is beyond that gate. Maybe climbing that mountain would be fun. Perhaps honing my craft in creating the best leatherwork in the area is more my style. But I can't do any of that because unlocking the gate requires killing exactly 10 rats for every person who needs to go through, but only once. How the guard keeps track I have no idea. I can't climb that mountain because when I get too close there is some sort of invisible magic wall preventing me from getting even a step closer. And I can't hope to do leatherwork because anyone who wants to do it can and be a master at it in a day's time, and everyone selling the same exact leatherwork has undercut each other on a broker market that magically spans the planet.
I want to do what I want to do, so let me.
Sandbox for life, yo.
Currently playing:
Rift
Played:
SWToR, Aion,EQ, Dark Age of Camelot
World of Warcraft, AoC
01) Cash Shops. Nothing brings me back into the real world like a cash shop.
02) A group of monsters standing around. One gets shot at. Only that ONE comes after the attacker.
03) Tanks that "taunt" monsters into attacking them when they don't even speak the same language.
04) Dragons that lower themselves into being a mount for some tiny player character they could eat whole in one bite.
05) As some have mentioned before, animals that drop gear. A coin or two I can see them swallowing, but plate mail and greatswords?
06) Monsters that use weapons and armor that you do not get to loot when they die. They just... vanish...
07) Crafting systems where you cannot break down items, especially those you have crafted, into raw materials.
08) Action combat. Everyone's a black belt in jujitsu, it seems. Or highly acrobatic in their armor.
09) Being able to run, full speed, for endless hours in full gear with multiple backpacks loaded with kilotons worth of loot.
10) Sneaking in full sunlight with no cover or shadows nearby.
11) Time does not matter. You get a quest to save someone's kidnapped daughter. Three weeks later you decide to clear the quest and go save her. There she is, all fine and dandy. Monsters are the same in an area day or night.
12) Seasons don't happen. You can harvest food anytime of the year. Zones don't change with the seasons.
13) Instanced dungeons.
I better stop. I could go on
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
subscriptions - they are nothing more than a rip off. My cell phone is a rip off, my cable bill is a rip off, my internet service is a rip off. I don't need to add another rip off to the list.
raiding/gear grind - because we can't make content extensive enough to keep people happy for a long period, lets make it so they can only play once a week.
raiding/gear grind on P2P games - lets charge them monthly to play content once a week, so it takes them a year to get all the pretend items they want. Then after that, we'll release an expansion so that all the stuff they gained becomes useless and they have to start over.
15/month is cheap - yeah, lets make it sound like the developers are doing us a favor by charging $15 each month, after all, it's cheaper than some other waste of money.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
Looking at: The Repopulation
Preordering: None
Playing: Random Games
A wolf in one zone has 100,000 HP, but in the first zone the same sized wolf had 22.
I'm the hero, and everyone else in my raid group, and all the other [Max level] characters, and that gold farmer spamming trade chat has the same quests to save the world once and for all.
I may be the savior of the world, but that NPC thinks I have enough time to collect apples for her.
What about collecting apples and talking to her gave me XP? How does that make me stronger? Why can't she just give me more XP to be nice? Why can't I, the savior of the world, have the mystical power the level 2 NPC has to grant XP?
When an expansion comes, it replaces all existing content for current and future players.
I can afford a diamond sword enchanted to +8 dexterity, but I am homeless (Only applies to some games).
That NPC will wait for years for me to get around returning her apples, and still reward me the same.
I'm pretty sure that rat was naked. If I found these pants from that, I'm not too sure I want to wear them after considering the places it could have been stored.
Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go kill that. Go fetch me some apples. Go talk to the guy right next to me. Go back and talk to the NPC you just talked to. Kill some more stuff. Oh, get some items from the stuff I just asked you to kill. Go to the next town. Raid.
I'm wearing armor; I'm not god. Why am I taking a smack from a dragon twenty times my size and not dying on the spot?
Why do the NPCs tell me to press M to open up my minimap? They're in the game, why do they know what 'M' is?
That I am an unmitigated hero according to every npc from the time I enter the game.
I'd rather actually prove that I'm a hero through a lifetime of increasingly difficult quests/activities and only after overcoming many failures.
That there are games being released with a watered down experience that is given better by a single player RPG or ARPG that are being called MMORPGs. That it's ok that they've devolved into something the original vision wasn't meant to be, but that's ok because we have epics now!
I would like the return of the experience that only MMO's can provide. Not a single player RPG or ARPG...but with a chat box!
Played: EQ1 (10 Years), Guild Wars, Rift, TERA
Tried: EQ2, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes of Magic and countless others...
Currently Playing: GW2
Nytlok Sylas
80 Sylvari Ranger
The new "free-to-play" + subscriptions = hybrids
mmos keep coming with new ideas to test your patience, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, when you are, already trying hard enough to like them. I call this one: negative reinforcement. They not only give you less options, they apply you a whole lot of annoying limitations and not so trivial needs and constantly remind you of all of them, almost every feature that the game has to offer is modified so you can feel the difference.
small letters:
if you can't put up with it, quit or pay.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
That one at least makes some sense... In P&P games you can use a sword but the chanse you hit in combat is really low. The idea behind that is that becoming good in melee combat with weapons like that takes a lot of work, which the mage instead are using for studying books and making magical experiements.
If a MMO used chanses to hit like P&P games you can easily have a similar system, but for some reason all attacks in MMOs always hit (some of them just dont do any actual damage). I am actually surprised no MMO ever tried something like this.
My list:
Daily quests. The most boring MMO idea ever, minimum work for the devs for the time people spend doing them.
"Smart" stupid bosses. One would assume that a drgon or similar ultra smart boss would fight smarter than a animal, like dont falling for taunts, change tactics when the players clearly dominate him and so on. And FFS use the powerful magical item he drops.
Taunts. They makes combat far too predictable and stupid.
Too many identical skills. In games like EQ2 you have tons of attack skills but most of them are more or less the same, and I am not talking about the skills you upgrade. My swashie rotated 30 or so skills but they were in fact less than 10 different skills, the rest were the same with a slight difference in damage and animation. It adds nothing to the game besides some more fastkeybars.
Worthless crafting. In a certain game I was forced making about 100 tin greatswords to level my crafting a little to the next reciepe. I couldnt give away that crap for free and I swear that the npc vendor smirked at me while I trashed them. It is not so hard to make what you need for crafting a bit harder to get and at least only force me to make 1 of each the useless unsellable crap if you must have them in at all. Crafting in MMOs could be so fun but usually suck so much.
Dont forget that you get less when a game go F2P and you continue to sub for it, suddenly you still need to pay to get access to some stuff.
I dont mind F2P like PW or something, but the standard western model do indeed suck.
Not a feature of the games , but definately of the genre. "The Migration", hyping the next big thing, that new game that will give you a buzz like your first hit of MMo games, then the jaded disappointment , trolling forums and moving on to the next wow killing hype fest.
Just enjoy whats there for what it is, it wont be all things to all people.
Listing of my concepts I can not stand, in no particular order:
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Either way, you can't lose! Try it out sometime!
Dear god NO.
Nothing is as grotesque an eyesore then having thousands of off-line people standing around anywhere they please setting up a shop.
Now I could buy this argument if it was at a players house but no, we do not need anything more to get people to clog up cities.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Don't play world of warcraft or most of the other copies of it that have come out sincer 2005, since they all pretty much have all of those things you dislike in them, however I can reccomend everquest 2, since it seems to have the least amount of them. The game did get wowified a bit so it could try to compete with wow, mostly this was in the vein of adding quest hubs.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Either way, you can't lose! Try it out sometime!
I have to agree with Azzamasin on this one, the whole stall idea alot of asian mmo's use is just terrible, it makes it a pain in the ass to find what your looking for since none of these games have anyway to search them (only exception is ragnarok online that has a player run bot that lists the items, sellers location etc and uploads them to a searchable database). The whole stall was and still is a horrible idea. AH is also better because it helps regulate prices, in a game with stalls people price things all over the place since there is no ingame way to check what a item is worth in general without bugging people. IMO they use the stall system just because the game devs want to be lazy and not have to code a AH. Almost every town in any mmo has tons of buildings that are bascally unused in anyway cept to make the town look more full. Its not that easy to code a properlly functioning AH, but coding a stall is piss easy so they just kinda cop out.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Either way, you can't lose! Try it out sometime!
Ohh I quit WoW right after Cata and trust me, I can not stand WoW clones like Rit or SWTOR. I dont mind themeparks per se, especially oens like GW2, ESO and Neverwinter because they break the WoW clone mold.
EDIT: your sig is spot on and I agree 100%
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Interesting isn't it - that a good consequences system hasn't been developed - it isn't really that hard if you concentrate some effort on it.
All of the above could be put in place without too much trouble.