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Item decay is treadmill gaming, permadeath is score gaming
Adamantine
Member RarePosts: 5,094
What I feel in many threads discussions is that people forget that games are supposed to be fun.
Fun can be story content, or it can be socialization, or it can be challenges of sorts.
However, if you introduce stuff like item decay into your game, it doesnt mean that crafting is important in your game. It means crafting is a hassle. It means crafting just HAS to be done, all the time, again and again, and is thus a timewaster. It means a sane player will script their crafting because they cant avoid it - even if it needs zip thinking and has zip entertainment value.
Item decay makes complex items impossible. Working for hours at a single item is just not an option anymore.
Thus, item decay is treadmill gaming. It trivialized content and it keeps players busy with an inherently dull action.
Crafting as an entertaining game element means it must offer a challenge. It means your crafting system would have to be complex and powerful, making it possible to spend extended length of time for better results. An ideal crafting system would allow you to spend weeks in the process of crafting the ultimate item, and months to collect the ultimate ingredients. Then crafting has entertainment value because you actually archieve something.
Permadeath has the same problem. People demand permadeath to make games "harder". But in reality, permadeath is usually creating games that are easier, or even simply trivial. They are score games - you check out how long your character can survive, and then when ultimately your character will die, you get a score. Thats all the game is about - get the highest score. Any attempt to introduce real complexity into such a game is pretty much superflous. Thus the game turn really easy, they are typically twitch based, like Tetris.
There are exceptions. You can make the permadeath mode a special mode of an ordinary RPG. Like the hardcore mode of Diablo 2. Or you can introduce elements that can compensate for permadeath - like clones in EVE.
Diablo 2 hardcore mode works because there is a non-hardcore mode where you can test what works and what doesnt work, thus removing the potential immense frustration from the hardcore mode. Hardcore mode in Diablo 2 is still a score game, though - it includes the toplists. And you can basically "cheat" - you can store the good drops gained in the hardcore mode on a second character that isnt exploring and thus doesnt face the danger of permadeath, so while the character will be gone, the good drops will still be there.
EVE works because thanks to stuff like cloning. It is thus not actually really permadeath.
If you introduce such loopholes, a game can be complex and technically have permadeath and make sense as a game concept. But in general, permadeath means your game is pretty shallow and just a score game.
Comments
Some other points I want to add regarding Item Decay and how much it mattered in Pre-NGE SWG (Pre fall of 2005).
1. Powerful items were kept in control. They never stayed in permanent existence because they eventually wear out, or that the owner kept it for special occasions like important PVP sessions or whatever.
2. With the regulation of high-end items, other bits of gear were viable. If I wanted to, I can purchase average costing & quality gear and hop onto PVP and not feel like a speedbump due to my gear.
3. A chance for crafters to gain repeated business from a customer. Since your weapons, armor, etc. wear out, the adventurer needs to find replacements. Which leads into...
4. Fair pricing... And that adventurer will seek a merchant that can offer him the best items for his money. Crafters competed to get your business back by offering a compromise in quality and cost to the adventurer. You learned to avoid the rip-offs, and who offered a good deal. With the chance for the repeated business, gear was fairly priced. In 20004, when things were humming along nicely in the game, a quality set of all 7 pieces of Composite Armor costed a buyer anywhere from 150k-220k credits, depending on the market for quality resources available. When the game did away with item decay, it skyrocketed to the millions. Without the decay, crafters needed to get all their money they can possibly get with that 1 purchase that you will ever make with them. With the decay, they knew you were always looking for more, and the game was one between them to earn your business (preferrably repeated).
====
The way I see it, in terms of crafting, combat, and the economy, my ideal MMORPG would have.
a. Deep crafting system for those that want to dive into it.
b. Crafting should never be forced. But again, it is there for those that want a totally different style of play that they could, in effect, totally replace their combat time with it.
c. A healthy, constant cycle. Combat adventurers (PVP or PVE oriented) always will need quality gear, and will seek out a good deal for those replacements. And Crafters in return compete to offer such gear.
====
A side note in how SWG additionally handled the relationship between dedicated fighters and dedicated crafters/merchants. For the truly high-end items, you of course needed high-end, rare components. Quite oftenly, this was only found by taking down some very powerful NPCs / Creatures / etc. This means the fighting types get that stuff. On the other hand, you needed a competent crafter with quality tools to make you the best item possible for your hard-earned reward.
This was where you learned to bargain and work something out. That high-end final product can net the crafter great cash, but they don't want to set their services cost so high that the customer is put off to look for business elsewhere. I've worked out many deals with crafters with some hard earned components.
Hell, on the old Ahazi Server, I still, after all these years since I left the game in 2005, remember my favorite weaponsmith's character name. A Rodian by the name of 'Az. The guy got me good deals and I've frequently recommended him to friends in the game since the guy made quality products at competitive prices.
A good MMORPG, IMO, should have any player, despite their angle of play, potentially be a key member of the server. That crafter and dedicated combatant should both feel that the game offers them good play despite what their preferred method of play be. And they all need each other at one point or another. And *maybe* because you need each other at one point or another, develop a better sense of community.
"No man is an island," and that should be true in an MMORPG. Again, my opinion.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
This might come as a surpirse for you OP but some people love to craft and build their own houses in a game, not everyone likes killing mobs 24/7.
Item decay is a must to have good ground for a good player driven economy.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
I take it you're not a UO fan.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
And yet it is a major inconvenience to those who are uninterested in crafting and economy - and they are a majority among gamers. The net sum is negative. Find another way to drive economy.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
They are not forced in anyway to craft anything they can hack mobs left and right how much they like so i fail to see your point.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
is it? Is it? It is? My favourite poster, Torgrim. Hey mate. I agree.
The OP makes the usual snap conclusions based on the premise that "most people think like me and like what I like". So he then blithely declares that because "most players" hate item decay and permadeath, these features should never appear in MMO's.
Wrong.
Those features should not appear in MMO's that are aiming at the mass market. But there's plenty of scope for those features in games that target a specific subset of the overall playerbase.
We need more diversity in game choices, not a homogenised and sanitised collection of games that appeal to the widest possible audience.
Some other points I want to add regarding Item Decay and how much it mattered in Pre-NGE SWG (Pre fall of 2005).
1. Powerful items were kept in control. They never stayed in permanent existence because they eventually wear out, or that the owner kept it for special occasions like important PVP sessions or whatever.
2. With the regulation of high-end items, other bits of gear were viable. If I wanted to, I can purchase average costing & quality gear and hop onto PVP and not feel like a speedbump due to my gear.
3. A chance for crafters to gain repeated business from a customer. Since your weapons, armor, etc. wear out, the adventurer needs to find replacements. Which leads into...
4. Fair pricing... And that adventurer will seek a merchant that can offer him the best items for his money. Crafters competed to get your business back by offering a compromise in quality and cost to the adventurer. You learned to avoid the rip-offs, and who offered a good deal. With the chance for the repeated business, gear was fairly priced. In 20004, when things were humming along nicely in the game, a quality set of all 7 pieces of Composite Armor costed a buyer anywhere from 150k-220k credits, depending on the market for quality resources available. When the game did away with item decay, it skyrocketed to the millions. Without the decay, crafters needed to get all their money they can possibly get with that 1 purchase that you will ever make with them. With the decay, they knew you were always looking for more, and the game was one between them to earn your business (preferrably repeated).
====
The way I see it, in terms of crafting, combat, and the economy, my ideal MMORPG would have.
a. Deep crafting system for those that want to dive into it.
b. Crafting should never be forced. But again, it is there for those that want a totally different style of play that they could, in effect, totally replace their combat time with it.
c. A healthy, constant cycle. Combat adventurers (PVP or PVE oriented) always will need quality gear, and will seek out a good deal for those replacements. And Crafters in return compete to offer such gear.
====
A side note in how SWG additionally handled the relationship between dedicated fighters and dedicated crafters/merchants. For the truly high-end items, you of course needed high-end, rare components. Quite oftenly, this was only found by taking down some very powerful NPCs / Creatures / etc. This means the fighting types get that stuff. On the other hand, you needed a competent crafter with quality tools to make you the best item possible for your hard-earned reward.
This was where you learned to bargain and work something out. That high-end final product can net the crafter great cash, but they don't want to set their services cost so high that the customer is put off to look for business elsewhere. I've worked out many deals with crafters with some hard earned components.
Hell, on the old Ahazi Server, I still, after all these years since I left the game in 2005, remember my favorite weaponsmith's character name. A Rodian by the name of 'Az. The guy got me good deals and I've frequently recommended him to friends in the game since the guy made quality products at competitive prices.
A good MMORPG, IMO, should have any player, despite their angle of play, potentially be a key member of the server. That crafter and dedicated combatant should both feel that the game offers them good play despite what their preferred method of play be. And they all need each other at one point or another. And *maybe* because you need each other at one point or another, develop a better sense of community.
"No man is an island," and that should be true in an MMORPG. Again, my opinion.
As a longtime crafter in original SWG, I agree on all points. Removing decay and making the loot the center of the economy were among the worst changes to that game during its early life.Just think your proposition through for once! Item decay brings along with it...
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
So the game has to keep you constantly high? That's how I am reading where you are coming from.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Item decay is great.
For the folks that really enjoy the crafting aspect of MMO's it keeps them engaged.
It is fantastic for a true player driven economy.
I agree. We see many ideas in this forum about what could be done to make MMORPGs better. There seems to be a crowd who participate here who equate maximizing interesting gameplay with dumbing them down. That is just plain silly.
Item decay is one of those ideas that leads to less enjoyment for the vast majority of players. The only ones who would benefit are those who craft above all else by creating an artificial dependency on their services.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Because without it, they'll simply do what they have always done: blow through content in a month, quit, and come here and complain how pathetic end games are.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
He may be one of the cool kids who knows what "pre-CU SWG" means...or not. It makes no difference.
Dedicated crafters don't like to hear it but crafting and economic market simulations are not core MMORPG gameplay activities. I know many find it enjoyable and good for them. But there's a problem when you start to mess with people's enjoyment of actual core adventuring gameplay to create a bigger market for fishing, cooking, alchemy, leatherworking, etc. The fact that you can craft it yourself is also irelevant since many, myself included, prefer to not craft at all or give you crafters my gold.
Item decay adds extra complexity, but not of the enjoyable type. It just creates more dreary overhead to have to deal witjh.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
I dont agree with this post at all. What is this core crafting, core adventuring? When I step into a MMORPG its a package deal, you deal with the good and bad. While i agree crafting and trading isnt played by the majority doesnt mean it isnt liked. I believe the new generation of MMO gamers simply hasnt giving it a chance, but at some point they well crave a deeper experience from their games because I remember my first MMORPG all i wanted to do was kill shit, crafting and trading was an afterthought. At the same time a lot of dev/publishers are catering to te lowest common denominator and cashing in bigger for it so we may never see that AAA tittle with sort of gameplay.
MMORPG should be an art from their makers instead today visions are altered because of the bigger potential payoff as well the players screaming for things to become easier. Its like asking a famous artist to change his painting so its more likely to sell.
You are paying for the entire game, not an individual piece of the game (like combat). Don't like crafting? Don't buy a game with crafting as a focal point. I don't like spaceships. I'm not going to buy EVE and then tell everyone spaceships are stupid.
With that said... crafting shouldn't exist if it is going to be half-assed in a game and has no point. I'd rather have a good crafting system with an interesting economy or nothing at all (and have everything be looted and for devs to spend time making other systems better). All these mini-side-game-crafting-MMOs needs to go away forever.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
Games are time wasters. Entertaining time wasting is called gameplay.
One person's work is another person's fun. Seriously.
Have you played UO?
To address your points:
If you think in terms of WoW, yes, your points are very valid. Not every game is designed like WoW, though.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Lineage had an awesome player economy too and it didn't have item decay. Item decay is a punishment system. I would rather see an incentive system rather than a punishment system to remove game resources. It's not very fun.
Incentives can only go so far. Are you going to continually increase new recipes/schematics to make the old ones obsolete? That's not much help. Neither is soulbinding/biolinking items. Item decay may not be perfect, but it beats all the alternatives in a game with heavy crafting. Everyone who played SWG saw what happened when item decay was removed: items went up by at least 10X in price, because you only ever needed to buy that item once. In Eve, you have item LOSS, which is a more direct form of decay. And in SWG there were things to mitigate item decay: insurance terminals reduced wear associated with deaths, and weapons/armor could be repaired multiple times, on a reducing basis, so it was not like an item would wear down and be instantly useless.We know that item decay "worked" in SWG, because when it went away, we saw the utter devastation in the player economy, player interdependence, the crafting game, the whole of SWG itself.
I can't agree with the OP.
Crafting by template makes it manfacturing but crafting with variable results and decay make for variety and priority. If you have 4 "identical" swords but one has a slightly better blade and does more damage, you use that for epic fights and grind with the others in hopes of getting a better one.
Any game I can say I truly had fun with, I was crafting or doing something tied to it and leveled by accident. Any game I was forced to level to open the next version of the same thing I did yesterday ended up failing me. It's all about objectives but crafting I find is a good way to split them and allow people to make their own. You want to make Armor, he wants to make health packs another guy wants to make weapons. It's repeatable content.
Twinks are going to do what they have always done: grouse about variables that add complexity to their path to combat uberness. But it doesn't mean they have a point.
Yes, combat players say they don't "like" decay. But what they say and what they do are two totally different things. Because I've never seen anyone quit over decay, nor have I ever seen a combat player hesitate to pick up a game with decay.
I have, however, seen combat players quit when decay systems are taken out. It isn't because they especially like crafting or even want a player economy. But they just get bored with the static nature of their games. The ability to have what you want, on your terms, predictable and not subject to decay or decline, is very comforting to combat players. It allows them to easily complete their goals and amass all that they want, very quickly, without any limiting constraint outside of their ability to keep logged on and fight in static instance after static instance.
And, predictably, they accomplish their goals in record time, and find no more reason to log on or maintain any interest. Or (more likely), they wake up one day three weeks into their play experience and say "you know, this is boring." And they churn out.
Indeed, the data coming out of the industry seems to support my claims. Some of the most popular games out there have decay: the Fallout series and the Diablo series. So while you see the combat types crawl out of the woodwork in threads like this, and say they hate decay, they aren't being totally honest. If they hate decay so much, why do they play so many games with decay in it?
Because decay is a dynamic system. It gives what would be an otherwise static thing, like a piece of gear, a wrinkle of variability across time. And that--despite what the grousers say--is a good thing. It holds their attention longer. It makes them into more than content consumers; it integrates them into systems. And that's a good thing. Because if you are just there to consume content, you'll have no reason to stay once you power your way through the content. But if you are integrated into a system of supply and exchange, you'll feel like a part of something more.
The industry has been bending over backwards to give combat players what they say they want. And this is why decay has been a tough mechanic to find in the post-WoW era. But you have to wonder how the combat players have "rewarded" this loyalty, because all the data I see seems to indicate they log on at launch, play for three months top, and leave.
Why are they so bored, when the developers are giving them everything they say they want? Because what combat folks say they want, and what they actually do, are totally different things.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE