Your argument is based on nothing tangable. We had no trinity, we didnt NEED a reason to group for anything other than being in fun company...does that make you a sad panda? It should, cause you were being FORCED to play with others by bad game design.
Please, allow me to HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA@you for 8 years of being forced to play with others you may not have even liked!
Ok, explain asheron's call grouping to me then if it's so much better.
I already did.
We didnt "have to" group, we grouped because we had MORE FUN TOGETHER. Your MMO experience must be pretty sad if you never grouped with people just because its fun to play with them...gawd damn that sounds horrid...a lot like having to be told what your role is by some game developer 1000 miles away that you never met.
Look, I dont actually expect you to understand. Its like GW2, so many people that thought they were leet, the uber doods, the best of the best, logged into that game and just plain couldnt figure it out. They had no definition and because of that, because someone wasnt HOLDING THEIR HAND, they had no idea what to actually do.
There were too many choices. The very idea that they could DPS, heal, CC, tank...all on the same character...their heads filled with "WTF" and they SUCKED.
I however can bunker elementalist 12+ mobs with several elites and walk away fine...I can throw a heal + a hot on my group while still CCing, dropping DoTs, sending in elementals to off tank and switch right back to heals...because my mind isnt trapped in the holy trinity box that some games tried to trap me in after I stopped playing AC1.
I know I can throw a heal and someone if they need it and then switch right back to DPSing or tanking, yes, healing while tanking. Games without the trinity creates SMARTER players, the trinity creates players with few real skills outside of games that allow you to FACEROLL.
Um no. I didn't say it was better, I said why not, as in why isn't that a reasonable alternative.
That's fine, but there's 3 people now who say Asheron's call grouping is better and not a single one who played it. Awesome, this discussion went nowhere fast.
I'll come back when someone actually has a reasonable alternative outside of EVE or game they haven't even played.
I gave you 4 or 5 examples of games that either didn't have trinity or had more than 3 roles, or ways of customizing them. And Eve is a valid alternative.
All I know about AC was it was very successfull game, it had housing and it was skillbased. In terms of deciding if thats a reasonable alternative I don't need to know anymore than that
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
We didnt "have to" group, we grouped because we had MORE FUN TOGETHER. Your MMO experience must be pretty sad if you never grouped with people just because its fun to play with them...gawd damn that sounds horrid...a lot like having to be told what your role is by some game developer 1000 miles away that you never met.
Look, I dont actually expect you to understand. Its like GW2, so many people that thought they were leet, the uber doods, the best of the best, logged into that game and just plain couldnt figure it out. They had no definition and because of that, because someone wasnt HOLDING THEIR HAND, they had no idea what to actually do.
There were too many choices. The very idea that they could DPS, heal, CC, tank...all on the same character...their heads filled with "WTF" and they SUCKED.
I however can bunker elementalist 12+ mobs with several elites and walk away fine...I can throw a heal + a hot on my group while still CCing, dropping DoTs, sending in elementals to off tank and switch right back to heals...because my mind isnt trapped in the holy trinity box that some games tried to trap me in after I stopped playing AC1.
I know I can throw a heal and someone if they need it and then switch right back to DPSing or tanking, yes, healing while tanking. Games without the trinity creates SMARTER players, the trinity creates players with few real skills outside of games that allow you to FACEROLL.
Did you play AC, truthfully?
Dont bother replying, nothing anyone says is going to matter to you, you will just make up so new rule that dismisses it.
Or should I play your game...did you really play EQ1? I mean, just having the trinity isnt reason enough to group, did you really play? Tell me something REASONABLE first because I dont see how just having the trinity alone is a reason to group when I have played so many others where we grouped because we actually LIKED EACH OTHER AND HAD FUN!
Give me something reasonable...
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Dont bother replying, nothing anyone says is going to matter to you, you will just make up so new rule that dismisses it.
Or should I play your game...did you really play EQ1? I mean, just having the trinity isnt reason enough to group, did you really play? Tell me something REASONABLE first because I dont see how just having the trinity alone is a reason to group when I have played so many others where we grouped because we actually LIKED EACH OTHER AND HAD FUN!
Give me something reasonable...
Yes, I played EQ since kunark, I have a warrior with 1.0, 1,5, and 2.0 and my demiplane flag made it 2,5. I wielded it with my BBOB all through Omens and DoD until I upgraded it in Ashengate. Everyone who knows EQ now knows I played it.
But you never played AC but said you did, you can say nothing about AC except that it was fun.
Next time don't get caught lying with your pants down.
Yes, I played EQ since kunark, I have a warrior with 1.0, 1,5, and 2.0 and my demiplane flag made it 2,5. I wielded it with my BBOB all through Omens and DoD until I upgraded it in Ashengate. Everyone who knows EQ now knows I played it.
But you never played AC but said you did, you can say nothing about AC except that it was fun.
Next time don't get caught lying with your pants down.
I said something reasonable. No amount of people knowing you played is a reasonable reason to group. Nor is having a warrior with a flag a reasonable reason.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
My biggest issue with the holy trinity has always been the sure moronic stupidity that is threat generation. The easiest way to make tanks viable in PvP and keep your "Holy Trinity" is to do away with the PoS system that is threath generation and have the tank use more innovative ways of keeping the damage off of the squishes. League of Legends and other MOBAS are great examples of tanks that work in PvP. Pulls, stuns, dazes, silences, damage mitigations, shields, knockbacks. This is how you can fix the Holy Trinity.
TO fix the forced grouping mechanic of needing a healer and a tank to get anything done, it's simple. Allow every class the ability to work as healers and tanks if they spec they're characters that way. RIFT was pretty good at this. The 4 archetypes all had at least one way to dps, tank, and heal. Maybe not as effectively as others but if they played well, they good get it done. An important part of this is allwoing you to switch builds and not be heavily item dependant.
Exactly.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
But those early games were remarkably different (just in feel) from a modern loot-driven mmo, in ways that aren't always easy to describe. You can't write it off with a pat answer, either.
But those early games were remarkably different (just in feel) from a modern loot-driven mmo, in ways that aren't always easy to describe. You can't write it off with a pat answer, either.
But I do love the link talking about a game 12 YEARS after its release. AC1 was not always a bot fest, that came over 5 years later.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
But I do love the link talking about a game 12 YEARS after its release. AC1 was not always a bot fest, that came over 5 years later.
What do you expect to see? We're living a decade later (though some obviously are still firmly stuck back there)
:shake head: and yes, I did read that 06 date wrong. I am sorry about that one.
If forums run true to form, 3 dozen users will now point out my error, with glee.
...so, a guy is talking about proof the Trinity is important because of EQ1 back in the day, is asking for proof otherwise, so games are given, but we are supposed to go by how the game is today.
Ok, thanks for playing...seriously...no amount of bots today has to do with what it was like before, thus has no bearing on what is being said here.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Ok, thanks for playing...seriously...no amount of bots today has to do with what it was like before, thus has no bearing on what is being said here.
And nothing you say, 10 years later, does either; right? Or are we going to keep leaning on appeal to authority anyway?
Nice red herring.
He asked for proof people group without the trinity. He got it, we grouped without the trinity when we were playing, no amount of time passing or game changing is going to take that away...Hey, SWG is no longer running, I guess everything everyone ever experienced in the game never happened because people are no longer experiencing anything in it.
amidoinitrite?
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Getting back to the OP. I think that the "holy trinity" isn't really too much of a problem. It's been around and has been designed to hell and back. To say that you don't like it, is just saying you don't like grouping.
There are games that have done some things out of the norm. EQII attempted to make a straight up debuffing class, where all the class did was strip MOBs and bosses of everything and make them all kinds of vulnerable. But this proved to be VERY boring as EQII became more of a solo game.
I personally wanted to see some kind of addition to the Holy Trinity more in the line of a raid crafter. Basically you would design your game's skills around consumables that were supplied by people who could craft and harvest from objects in the instance. The quality of crafted items would directly affect the power of skills. (Imagine in another game that this was someone who would just be able to restore your mana and in combat mana never regenerated). The entire class focus would be to harvest things around the encounter (which could be filled with skills and traps, and environemnt effects) and provide consumables in a good balance.
But there are just a ton of problems and complications in design with a system like this.
Getting back to the OP. I think that the "holy trinity" isn't really too much of a problem. It's been around and has been designed to hell and back. To say that you don't like it, is just saying you don't like grouping.
There are games that have done some things out of the norm. EQII attempted to make a straight up debuffing class, where all the class did was strip MOBs and bosses of everything and make them all kinds of vulnerable. But this proved to be VERY boring as EQII became more of a solo game.
I personally wanted to see some kind of addition to the Holy Trinity more in the line of a raid crafter. Basically you would design your game's skills around consumables that were supplied by people who could craft and harvest from objects in the instance. The quality of crafted items would directly affect the power of skills. (Imagine in another game that this was someone who would just be able to restore your mana and in combat mana never regenerated). The entire class focus would be to harvest things around the encounter (which could be filled with skills and traps, and environemnt effects) and provide consumables in a good balance.
But there are just a ton of problems and complications in design with a system like this.
Interesting. Totally disagree with the red. And many games have more than the trinity or multiclassing or just no classes all together and people manage to group just fine.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
"And here you are trying to change it to yet another thing."
And that's why conversations never get anywhere here. There's the way people in the industry define things and there's the dozens of personal definitions of the people here. I just linked you the definition and history according to Richard Bartle, and your response is "and here you are trying to change it to yet another thing."
You see how that's a bit ridiculous, right?
Yeah, but the very article you're linking uses the term in a loose manner to refer to several implementations of the trinity across games. So even the article avoids the silliness of implying there's a "the trinity".
Implying we can't call other trinities trinity because the first one was about aggro is like saying we can't call modern MMORPGs MMORPGs because they are designed differently. At the end of the day, trinity still accurately describes the game mechanic (up until there are more or less than 3 roles that is :P )
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Originally posted by Hrimnir3. GW2 is not a success, 3 million boxes sold means nothing if only 1/8th of that still regularly log into the game.
1/8th of three million is 375,000. That's not too far off from Everquest's peak. Would you say Everquest was a failure?
Apples to Oranges. This is invalid argument.
That was my point. You're measuring the wrong thing here - counting active accounts would suggest Farmville was the best game ever made.
Is GW2 profitable enough to justify keeping the servers up and the content-team employed? Are the people still logging in to GW2 having more fun there than they were having elsewhere?
If the answer to both of those is "yes," then I consider it a success. And ftr, only the people still logging in can answer that second question; if you're not one of them, attempting to answer that question is an insult to your readers.
Originally posted by Hrimnir EVE ABSOLUTELY has the holy trinity, its just because its not called a cleric, or a DPS, or a tank. But you absolutely have to have DPS ships, support ships, and tank ships to be be succesful in a non 1 on 1 fight.
Eh?DPS, sure. But who's the tank - tackle? They don't manage aggro or hold positions, they debuff speed and prevent escape. Eve uses the word 'tank,' but it's less a role and more a reference to ship survivability.
And what is meant by support? We talking 'heal-analogs,' EW, or is this where tackle actually fits?
I mean sure, you could dodge and weave around vagaries enough to maybe argue Eve had a 'trinity' of some kind hiding under it's hood somewhere, but getting there takes far too circuitous a route to call it the Holy Trinity.
Vagaries? Please stop trying to play the intellectual elitism card, you're failing miserably at it. You obviously didnt play much EVE.
Yes, vagaries. Or equivocations, if you prefer.
Large battle involved lots of armor repair ships, shield repair ships, ships to perform electronic warfare on the enemy, whether that was messing with their targetting, draining their shields, etc etc. EVE is ALL ABOUT support ships.
Sure. But I'm seeing a *minimum* of two different varieties of support (and that's if we count all brands of EW as one category) only one of which actually maps out to one of the Holy Trinity roles. Also: I think you meant "draining capacitor."
And there's still no clear tank *role* unless you radically redefine the role of a tank. So yes: you can batter the definitions and concepts until they're meaningless if you're desperate to cram some kind of 'trinity' into it but it's not the Holy Trinity.
Originally posted by Hrimnir UO's focus was on PVP, and you can bet your ass the people who were most successful were the ones who showed up with a couple healers and CC'ers in the group. Lets see, 5 dps, 2 healers and a cc'er vs 8 dps, who do you think wins that fight...
Back when I was playing, I didn't see much '5 dps 2 healers and a cc'er." The opportunity cost of stacking CC and heal capability onto the DPS build wasn't high enough to justify not doing it in most cases. Dedicated healer or dedicated CC might have been *better* at it, but not by enough of a margin to create an actual edge against 8 JOATs.
I liked UO, but of the (few) classless games out there, it was one of the more vulnerable to the "everyone does everything" criticism. Might have changed after I left, though.
You really like your straw man arguments dont you. The point was that a group with a varied makeup of DPS, healers, and CC'ers is going to win (assuming equal player skill) against a group of all DPS, or all CC, or all healers.
My rebuttal was that you've crafted a strawman scenario, since *in that game* the mechanics broke role restrictions and only a fool would even even try to specialize along those angles.
Every competent or even second-tier build could at least heal and DPS, (at the same time, even) and most could do CC in one form or another as well (though some were better at it than others.) Under these conditions, the very idea of a group of "all DPS" (or all CC, or all healer) is a foreign concept belonging to some other game.
The only thing you've proven, is that there are people out there who will go to ridiculous lengths to try and force "holy trinity" thinking into games where it doesn't actually fit.
why not. Seems reasonable to me. There was nothing to force them to group, they just did it because it was fun.
ok so what was grouping in asheron's call needed for?
To give an additional example from AC that the other fellow didn't I'll note how players interacted with world events.
One of the most notable examples was when Bael'zharon was first showing up. It was the core gameplay elements that played to the way people decided to work in some pretty clever ways to see the success of Bael'zharon or Asheron depending on who wanted what outcome.
For example, when PvP enabled, characters in AC had a collision box so that they couldn't run through one another. While Bael'zharon was on the move, players defended him from other players trying to siege him by flagging for PvP and building a human wall, stacking on top of one another to intercept attacks.
This anecdote has little to do with a class system, but it ties in for me to my previous post (that seems to have gotten skipped over in favor of ongoing semantics).
If you want a more direct comment on the class system, it might be best to mention at the basic level how it worked. Being a classless system, the game gave you a swathe of trainable skills. The balancing factor was simply that you couldn't learn everything. You majored in a select set of skills and you could also train up a second tier of skills, but this ultimate meant that you customized your character into a thing that you wished to play. The differing factor is that without a class locked mechanic, players were free to hybridize, allowing for a range of play styles.
Sure, there were people who played solo and consequently preferred a more balanced character design to do solo combat with. Most people in PvP ultimately carried some similar skills simply because of game imbalances and the notable reliance on buffs/debuffs.
There was also an equal amount of people that simply built personalized characters that blended multiple elements, fit to their chosen playstyle, and offered a compatible aspect for the teams they chose to run with.
Like me personally, I largely took to archery. I was a bit more quirky at the time too, and spent a good bit of my time leveling up just off of cooking (yeah I actually cooked enough to be leveling off it ), but I chose my skill set too based on my personal preference to control my distance and my consequent capacity to swap out to doing light support with buffs and heals between shooting targets. My brother elected to do a dagger and shield type melee character, but he still took life magic so he was something of a paladin in concept, largely using his magic to keep his own health up longer., while others of us shot or nuked the mobs to death.
Ultimately it was not simply a matter of whether or not there was classes, but what you were capable of doing with it all. Asheron's Call gave you more than a single simple method to combat and instead elected to rely on a different set of game mechanics that enabled a different kind of gameplay.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Although more specifically you could say the original trinity was the result of the original MUD combat mechanics. The EQ trinity was actually a foursome: tank, heal, dps and CC, because the game was harder and the amount of damage being put out by the mobs required CC *on top of healing* to take some of the mobs out of the fight so the healers could keep up with the damage output. It was only called a trinity in EQ because those 3 were required first - and then you added dps on top. It was actually the same tank/heal/dps + CC.
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"Anyways, i really disagree here. I think the aggro/taunt system is because of the holy trinity, not the other way around."
Well logically that can't be true because the taunt code must have been written first and players adapted to it. You may be right in terms of the games that came after the first one.
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"The main issue with a trinity-based system, is that it forces people to play with others, because the vast majority of players don't like playing tanks or healers, yet you are reliant on both to play a trinity game."
The real problem is that the grouping part of a game is inter-connected with the solo part of the game. If you have a grouping game with the trinity then plenty of people play tanks and healers because they can level better than dps. EQ's problem was more that requiring *three* necessary classes instead of just two created /LFG traffic jams. There's probably a simple mathematical proof of the effect of needing 1, 2 or 3 specific classes in a 6-man group game.
In a mostly solo based game which also has a grouping element there are two options, one is you keep the group roles which makes tanks/healers boring to solo which leads to there not being enough of them for the group part of the game, the second option is making all the classes easy to solo which over time tends to make the classes more and more the same. Making the classes more the same for the solo part means you lose the tactical combined arms part of grouping - resulting in what some people at least see as a zerg-fest.
So that's the first problem - the grouping part of the game is entwined with the non-grouping part and they need to be looked at together.
Some possible solutions in mostly solo games might be
- keep the generic classes but add some specific group-only abilities
- go back to distinctive classes and tailor the solo part of the game to the available classes
- a non-class option might be players choose skills as they level and some choices are group only skills
For a group game
- same as before but make sure content doesn't *require* too many specific classes for the size of the group or at least not all the same i.e. one dungeon might require tank/heal/dps + CC while another might require tank/heal/dps + rogue class abilities while another might require multiple tanks/heal/dps etc
"And here you are trying to change it to yet another thing."
And that's why conversations never get anywhere here. There's the way people in the industry define things and there's the dozens of personal definitions of the people here. I just linked you the definition and history according to Richard Bartle, and your response is "and here you are trying to change it to yet another thing."
You see how that's a bit ridiculous, right?
Yeah, but the very article you're linking uses the term in a loose manner to refer to several implementations of the trinity across games. So even the article avoids the silliness of implying there's a "the trinity".
Implying we can't call other trinities trinity because the first one was about aggro is like saying we can't call modern MMORPGs MMORPGs because they are designed differently. At the end of the day, trinity still accurately describes the game mechanic (up until there are more or less than 3 roles that is :P )
Well not to be rude, but what you're talking about is pretty irrelevant to the topic then, considering it's about the "holy" trinity, which includes tanks, tanks that use an aggro mechanic. Most games have a trinity of some kind, but the problem with some people is that they don't seem to be able to live without being able to taunt at will... or heal by covering their screen in rapidly color-changing health bars for that matter. The holy trinity is what the OP is asking people to change if they don't like it, not just any trinity.
But you're right, calling it "THE" trinity is silly, it's simply "A" trinity with a certain name that brings about a certain image when spoken or written. And the point is, it's not always a good image.
Getting back to the OP. I think that the "holy trinity" isn't really too much of a problem. It's been around and has been designed to hell and back. To say that you don't like it, is just saying you don't like grouping.
There are games that have done some things out of the norm. EQII attempted to make a straight up debuffing class, where all the class did was strip MOBs and bosses of everything and make them all kinds of vulnerable. But this proved to be VERY boring as EQII became more of a solo game.
I personally wanted to see some kind of addition to the Holy Trinity more in the line of a raid crafter. Basically you would design your game's skills around consumables that were supplied by people who could craft and harvest from objects in the instance. The quality of crafted items would directly affect the power of skills. (Imagine in another game that this was someone who would just be able to restore your mana and in combat mana never regenerated). The entire class focus would be to harvest things around the encounter (which could be filled with skills and traps, and environemnt effects) and provide consumables in a good balance.
But there are just a ton of problems and complications in design with a system like this.
The trinity is very close to what it was from the start. We first saw it 1996 in Meridian 59 and it never changed that much.
The pre trinity was the old D&D version of meele, ranged, healer and theif which all were more or less a must to complete a dungeon.
I dont really believe in the trinity as such. I do believe in roles but I think that each role should be a good addition to the group but not a must. Preferably should each class be able to have a few roles and switch between them.
Roles such as tanks and dedicated healers suck because you must have them and they make combat rather predictable. Group dynamics should be important but there should be a degree of thinking fast and changing tactics to beat bosses. Trinity leads far too often to skill rotations and people standing in the same place doing the same thing over and over.
There are alternatives to regular trinity and zerging, anyone stating that the first ever thought of MMO mechanics that a small team of amateurs figured out have no imigination whatsoever.
Players shouldnt be able to control the mobs the way tanks do, combat should be unpredictable because it is more interesting that way.
Healing is not good either, you should be forced to preserve your health instead with defensive moves and tactics.
Getting back to the OP. I think that the "holy trinity" isn't really too much of a problem. It's been around and has been designed to hell and back. To say that you don't like it, is just saying you don't like grouping.
There are games that have done some things out of the norm. EQII attempted to make a straight up debuffing class, where all the class did was strip MOBs and bosses of everything and make them all kinds of vulnerable. But this proved to be VERY boring as EQII became more of a solo game.
I personally wanted to see some kind of addition to the Holy Trinity more in the line of a raid crafter. Basically you would design your game's skills around consumables that were supplied by people who could craft and harvest from objects in the instance. The quality of crafted items would directly affect the power of skills. (Imagine in another game that this was someone who would just be able to restore your mana and in combat mana never regenerated). The entire class focus would be to harvest things around the encounter (which could be filled with skills and traps, and environemnt effects) and provide consumables in a good balance.
But there are just a ton of problems and complications in design with a system like this.
The trinity is very close to what it was from the start. We first saw it 1996 in Meridian 59 and it never changed that much.
The pre trinity was the old D&D version of meele, ranged, healer and theif which all were more or less a must to complete a dungeon.
I dont really believe in the trinity as such. I do believe in roles but I think that each role should be a good addition to the group but not a must. Preferably should each class be able to have a few roles and switch between them.
Roles such as tanks and dedicated healers suck because you must have them and they make combat rather predictable. Group dynamics should be important but there should be a degree of thinking fast and changing tactics to beat bosses. Trinity leads far too often to skill rotations and people standing in the same place doing the same thing over and over.
There are alternatives to regular trinity and zerging, anyone stating that the first ever thought of MMO mechanics that a small team of amateurs figured out have no imigination whatsoever.
Players shouldnt be able to control the mobs the way tanks do, combat should be unpredictable because it is more interesting that way.
Healing is not good either, you should be forced to preserve your health instead with defensive moves and tactics.
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?"
Role systems are great, but nothing is a requirement for anything, no feature should ever be considered a standard, it is mentality like that which leads to banality.
The Trinity is quite possibly the worst implementation of a role system I have ever seen and counterproductive to the whole tactics and team work aspects. In a trinity battle system I have never really seen a healer interact with me (the tank), they do interact with my character, but they never interact or adapt to my tactics. The way they played never changed based on what I did with my tank, they healed based on the (rather predictable) mob's behaviour, not mine. Same goes for me, I acted based on the actions of the mob, not the actions of the DPS or the healer.
So far, the trinity has only really been an illusion of teamwork. As for an alternative, a role system but without absurd threat mechanics, build the game around formations and positioning instead, and add more roles to the system. Change the healer role to make it so that the battle is a lot more about avoiding that damage in the first place. As for examples, just look at what any SRPG or any other Turn Based Tactics game does, but adapt and alter it to make it fit into the mmo world.
I don't come up with somehing better eather sorry.
Maybe i am with idea, get rid of health mana bar and all numbers in game give all players same strenght to tank heal or dmg like DayZ and trinity gone:)
Comments
Did you play AC, truthfully?
I gave you 4 or 5 examples of games that either didn't have trinity or had more than 3 roles, or ways of customizing them. And Eve is a valid alternative.
All I know about AC was it was very successfull game, it had housing and it was skillbased. In terms of deciding if thats a reasonable alternative I don't need to know anymore than that
Dont bother replying, nothing anyone says is going to matter to you, you will just make up so new rule that dismisses it.
Or should I play your game...did you really play EQ1? I mean, just having the trinity isnt reason enough to group, did you really play? Tell me something REASONABLE first because I dont see how just having the trinity alone is a reason to group when I have played so many others where we grouped because we actually LIKED EACH OTHER AND HAD FUN!
Give me something reasonable...
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Yes, I played EQ since kunark, I have a warrior with 1.0, 1,5, and 2.0 and my demiplane flag made it 2,5. I wielded it with my BBOB all through Omens and DoD until I upgraded it in Ashengate. Everyone who knows EQ now knows I played it.
But you never played AC but said you did, you can say nothing about AC except that it was fun.
Next time don't get caught lying with your pants down.
I said something reasonable. No amount of people knowing you played is a reasonable reason to group. Nor is having a warrior with a flag a reasonable reason.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Exactly.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
He may be (intentionally or not) a little bit disingenuous about 'we only grouped for fun'.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/5473014#5473014, Post 4, from 2006.
I have no AC or AC2 experience, at all.
But those early games were remarkably different (just in feel) from a modern loot-driven mmo, in ways that aren't always easy to describe. You can't write it off with a pat answer, either.
Clearly...
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/5599423#5599423
But I do love the link talking about a game 12 YEARS after its release. AC1 was not always a bot fest, that came over 5 years later.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
What do you expect to see? We're living a decade later (though some obviously are still firmly stuck back there)
:shake head: and yes, I did read that 06 date wrong. I am sorry about that one.
If forums run true to form, 3 dozen users will now point out my error, with glee.
...so, a guy is talking about proof the Trinity is important because of EQ1 back in the day, is asking for proof otherwise, so games are given, but we are supposed to go by how the game is today.
Ok, thanks for playing...seriously...no amount of bots today has to do with what it was like before, thus has no bearing on what is being said here.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
And nothing you say, 10 years later, does either; right? Or are we going to keep leaning on appeal to authority anyway?
What am I saying? Of course that's your prerogative, and you two can keep playing badminton for several more pages.
G'night ya'll.
Nice red herring.
He asked for proof people group without the trinity. He got it, we grouped without the trinity when we were playing, no amount of time passing or game changing is going to take that away...Hey, SWG is no longer running, I guess everything everyone ever experienced in the game never happened because people are no longer experiencing anything in it.
amidoinitrite?
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Getting back to the OP. I think that the "holy trinity" isn't really too much of a problem. It's been around and has been designed to hell and back. To say that you don't like it, is just saying you don't like grouping.
There are games that have done some things out of the norm. EQII attempted to make a straight up debuffing class, where all the class did was strip MOBs and bosses of everything and make them all kinds of vulnerable. But this proved to be VERY boring as EQII became more of a solo game.
I personally wanted to see some kind of addition to the Holy Trinity more in the line of a raid crafter. Basically you would design your game's skills around consumables that were supplied by people who could craft and harvest from objects in the instance. The quality of crafted items would directly affect the power of skills. (Imagine in another game that this was someone who would just be able to restore your mana and in combat mana never regenerated). The entire class focus would be to harvest things around the encounter (which could be filled with skills and traps, and environemnt effects) and provide consumables in a good balance.
But there are just a ton of problems and complications in design with a system like this.
Interesting. Totally disagree with the red. And many games have more than the trinity or multiclassing or just no classes all together and people manage to group just fine.
Yeah, but the very article you're linking uses the term in a loose manner to refer to several implementations of the trinity across games. So even the article avoids the silliness of implying there's a "the trinity".
Implying we can't call other trinities trinity because the first one was about aggro is like saying we can't call modern MMORPGs MMORPGs because they are designed differently. At the end of the day, trinity still accurately describes the game mechanic (up until there are more or less than 3 roles that is :P )
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That was my point. You're measuring the wrong thing here - counting active accounts would suggest Farmville was the best game ever made.
Is GW2 profitable enough to justify keeping the servers up and the content-team employed? Are the people still logging in to GW2 having more fun there than they were having elsewhere?
If the answer to both of those is "yes," then I consider it a success. And ftr, only the people still logging in can answer that second question; if you're not one of them, attempting to answer that question is an insult to your readers.
Yes, vagaries. Or equivocations, if you prefer.
Sure. But I'm seeing a *minimum* of two different varieties of support (and that's if we count all brands of EW as one category) only one of which actually maps out to one of the Holy Trinity roles. Also: I think you meant "draining capacitor."
And there's still no clear tank *role* unless you radically redefine the role of a tank. So yes: you can batter the definitions and concepts until they're meaningless if you're desperate to cram some kind of 'trinity' into it but it's not the Holy Trinity.
My rebuttal was that you've crafted a strawman scenario, since *in that game* the mechanics broke role restrictions and only a fool would even even try to specialize along those angles.
Every competent or even second-tier build could at least heal and DPS, (at the same time, even) and most could do CC in one form or another as well (though some were better at it than others.) Under these conditions, the very idea of a group of "all DPS" (or all CC, or all healer) is a foreign concept belonging to some other game.
The only thing you've proven, is that there are people out there who will go to ridiculous lengths to try and force "holy trinity" thinking into games where it doesn't actually fit.
To give an additional example from AC that the other fellow didn't I'll note how players interacted with world events.
One of the most notable examples was when Bael'zharon was first showing up. It was the core gameplay elements that played to the way people decided to work in some pretty clever ways to see the success of Bael'zharon or Asheron depending on who wanted what outcome.
For example, when PvP enabled, characters in AC had a collision box so that they couldn't run through one another. While Bael'zharon was on the move, players defended him from other players trying to siege him by flagging for PvP and building a human wall, stacking on top of one another to intercept attacks.
This anecdote has little to do with a class system, but it ties in for me to my previous post (that seems to have gotten skipped over in favor of ongoing semantics).
If you want a more direct comment on the class system, it might be best to mention at the basic level how it worked. Being a classless system, the game gave you a swathe of trainable skills. The balancing factor was simply that you couldn't learn everything. You majored in a select set of skills and you could also train up a second tier of skills, but this ultimate meant that you customized your character into a thing that you wished to play. The differing factor is that without a class locked mechanic, players were free to hybridize, allowing for a range of play styles.
Sure, there were people who played solo and consequently preferred a more balanced character design to do solo combat with. Most people in PvP ultimately carried some similar skills simply because of game imbalances and the notable reliance on buffs/debuffs.
There was also an equal amount of people that simply built personalized characters that blended multiple elements, fit to their chosen playstyle, and offered a compatible aspect for the teams they chose to run with.
Like me personally, I largely took to archery. I was a bit more quirky at the time too, and spent a good bit of my time leveling up just off of cooking (yeah I actually cooked enough to be leveling off it ), but I chose my skill set too based on my personal preference to control my distance and my consequent capacity to swap out to doing light support with buffs and heals between shooting targets. My brother elected to do a dagger and shield type melee character, but he still took life magic so he was something of a paladin in concept, largely using his magic to keep his own health up longer., while others of us shot or nuked the mobs to death.
Ultimately it was not simply a matter of whether or not there was classes, but what you were capable of doing with it all. Asheron's Call gave you more than a single simple method to combat and instead elected to rely on a different set of game mechanics that enabled a different kind of gameplay.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
"The trinity is the result of taunt and the associated aggro system."
Exactly.
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2010/QBlog190810A.html
Although more specifically you could say the original trinity was the result of the original MUD combat mechanics. The EQ trinity was actually a foursome: tank, heal, dps and CC, because the game was harder and the amount of damage being put out by the mobs required CC *on top of healing* to take some of the mobs out of the fight so the healers could keep up with the damage output. It was only called a trinity in EQ because those 3 were required first - and then you added dps on top. It was actually the same tank/heal/dps + CC.
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"Anyways, i really disagree here. I think the aggro/taunt system is because of the holy trinity, not the other way around."
Well logically that can't be true because the taunt code must have been written first and players adapted to it. You may be right in terms of the games that came after the first one.
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"The main issue with a trinity-based system, is that it forces people to play with others, because the vast majority of players don't like playing tanks or healers, yet you are reliant on both to play a trinity game."
The real problem is that the grouping part of a game is inter-connected with the solo part of the game. If you have a grouping game with the trinity then plenty of people play tanks and healers because they can level better than dps. EQ's problem was more that requiring *three* necessary classes instead of just two created /LFG traffic jams. There's probably a simple mathematical proof of the effect of needing 1, 2 or 3 specific classes in a 6-man group game.
In a mostly solo based game which also has a grouping element there are two options, one is you keep the group roles which makes tanks/healers boring to solo which leads to there not being enough of them for the group part of the game, the second option is making all the classes easy to solo which over time tends to make the classes more and more the same. Making the classes more the same for the solo part means you lose the tactical combined arms part of grouping - resulting in what some people at least see as a zerg-fest.
So that's the first problem - the grouping part of the game is entwined with the non-grouping part and they need to be looked at together.
Some possible solutions in mostly solo games might be
- keep the generic classes but add some specific group-only abilities
- go back to distinctive classes and tailor the solo part of the game to the available classes
- a non-class option might be players choose skills as they level and some choices are group only skills
For a group game
- same as before but make sure content doesn't *require* too many specific classes for the size of the group or at least not all the same i.e. one dungeon might require tank/heal/dps + CC while another might require tank/heal/dps + rogue class abilities while another might require multiple tanks/heal/dps etc
Well not to be rude, but what you're talking about is pretty irrelevant to the topic then, considering it's about the "holy" trinity, which includes tanks, tanks that use an aggro mechanic. Most games have a trinity of some kind, but the problem with some people is that they don't seem to be able to live without being able to taunt at will... or heal by covering their screen in rapidly color-changing health bars for that matter. The holy trinity is what the OP is asking people to change if they don't like it, not just any trinity.
But you're right, calling it "THE" trinity is silly, it's simply "A" trinity with a certain name that brings about a certain image when spoken or written. And the point is, it's not always a good image.
The trinity is very close to what it was from the start. We first saw it 1996 in Meridian 59 and it never changed that much.
The pre trinity was the old D&D version of meele, ranged, healer and theif which all were more or less a must to complete a dungeon.
I dont really believe in the trinity as such. I do believe in roles but I think that each role should be a good addition to the group but not a must. Preferably should each class be able to have a few roles and switch between them.
Roles such as tanks and dedicated healers suck because you must have them and they make combat rather predictable. Group dynamics should be important but there should be a degree of thinking fast and changing tactics to beat bosses. Trinity leads far too often to skill rotations and people standing in the same place doing the same thing over and over.
There are alternatives to regular trinity and zerging, anyone stating that the first ever thought of MMO mechanics that a small team of amateurs figured out have no imigination whatsoever.
Players shouldnt be able to control the mobs the way tanks do, combat should be unpredictable because it is more interesting that way.
Healing is not good either, you should be forced to preserve your health instead with defensive moves and tactics.
Trinity is older than that.
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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."
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Role systems are great, but nothing is a requirement for anything, no feature should ever be considered a standard, it is mentality like that which leads to banality.
The Trinity is quite possibly the worst implementation of a role system I have ever seen and counterproductive to the whole tactics and team work aspects. In a trinity battle system I have never really seen a healer interact with me (the tank), they do interact with my character, but they never interact or adapt to my tactics. The way they played never changed based on what I did with my tank, they healed based on the (rather predictable) mob's behaviour, not mine. Same goes for me, I acted based on the actions of the mob, not the actions of the DPS or the healer.
So far, the trinity has only really been an illusion of teamwork. As for an alternative, a role system but without absurd threat mechanics, build the game around formations and positioning instead, and add more roles to the system. Change the healer role to make it so that the battle is a lot more about avoiding that damage in the first place. As for examples, just look at what any SRPG or any other Turn Based Tactics game does, but adapt and alter it to make it fit into the mmo world.
I don't like the holy trinity.
I don't come up with somehing better eather sorry.
Maybe i am with idea, get rid of health mana bar and all numbers in game give all players same strenght to tank heal or dmg like DayZ and trinity gone:)