Unless you feel that instances cut you off from the world and its players, and that the price of not being able to kill a certain boss sometimes due to competition is worth it in order to keep the game an actual world and not a multiplayer lobby. I think you need to realize that what you are looking for in an MMORPG is not what everyone is looking for.
Your logic is sound from your perspective. It is not sound from my perspective.
This isn't a subjective thing. If a given activity is rated Fun on a scale of Fun-to-Not-Fun, then forcing players to wait an hour for that activity isn't going to magically make it more fun. For anyone.
Wrong. 100% wrong.
I know you believe otherwise, Axe, but you do not hold a monopoly on what "fun" is for everyone.
I've played MMORPGs too long, and have seen far too many types of players, who have enjoyed, or disliked, any number of activities, to varying degrees, for various reasons. Some people loved camping rare mobs in FFXI. I mean, they did it constantly. If they were online, they were trying to find out what rare mob had its spawn window opening soon. The more contested the better. Because, they enjoyed the competition of being the one to get the claim/kill.
Yes.. to them... that was fun. To others? It was like watching paint dry. To others, it was fun in small doses. To others, it was something done out of necessity - because they wanted a drop it had, etc. Each of them had their own subjective idea of how fun camping rare mobs was or wasn't, and their level of participation in that activity reflected their feelings about it. For myself, I camped a rare mob maybe 4 times in the 7+ years I played. I just wasn't that interested most of the time because none of those rare drops were necessary to enjoy or do well in the game, and there were other activities I enjoyed more.
Many folks loved doing Dynamis. It was the highlight of their week. I didn't enjoy it at all, so I rarely ever participated. When I did, it was to help out 'cause they needed a few more people. My fun came from helping others out, not the activity itself.
The same goes for open world PvP, leveling up by mob grinding, crafting, harvesting, or doing any other kind of activity that a person may or may not wish to participate in.
The idea of "what is fun", or "how fun something is" is subjective. Period. End of discussion.
Fun happens overwhelmingly due to pattern mastery (Koster, 2003) which doesn't happen in the empty non-gameplay between the actual gameplay. So it actually is diluted. For everyone.
First, I detect weasel word usage when you say "overwhelmingly".
That said... Please provide a link to the full article you pulled that quote from, because I have a feeling you're taking it out of context, and engaging in a bit of confirmation bias.
Fun can be measured for anything you're doing. The down-time between content can be spent having fun while chatting with other players, joking around, etc. To those who enjoy socializing and joking around with fellow players, that is still fun , and it's still happening inside of a game.It's socializing, which is a huge part - or used to be - a huge part of what MMORPGs were. It's one of the cornerstones of a strong community, which older MMOs were known for, and newer MMOs all but completely lack.
Why is delayed gratification cynical? One person uses "instant gratification" in an attempt to be negative, so the only contrasting stance is obviously that that person believes delayed (non-instant) gratification is better. Straightforward and logical.
Seriously? You're playing this game now? The whole "I'll ignore what you actually said, so I can argue with what you didn't say" routine?
Your depiction of "delayed gratification" is cynical. Not the "delayed gratification" itself; I explained how/why it could take time to achieve a goal, and it was nothing to do with how you cynically described it.
You can talk about making the journey interesting, but the reality is travel is not interesting in nearly every game. So any idea that makes travel contain as many interesting decisions as regular content is just theoretical (or exists in the handful of non-MMOs which do manage to make travel interesting.)
And here you go with sweeping generalizations and weasel words again.
What is interesting to one person, may be boring as hell to someone else. Travel can be very fun, for someone who values the potential experiences to be had along the way. I prefer to go places on foot, or by mount if it's a really long distance (20+ minutes away), as much as possible, because I enjoy actually being out in the world, seeing the sights, maybe finding some out of the way places, or seeing something interesting going on. I can enjoy none of those things - in the context of traveling on foot/mount - if I'm just teleporting everywhere. Slower travel can be content in itself, and it can unexpectedly lead to content as well. Yes, that is something I enjoy... Your guffaws and protests notwithstanding. There are plenty of people I've seen and met and known personally in my time playing MMOs who've felt the same.
Do I sometimes prefer fast travel? Sure. Sometimes I'm more interested in "being there" than I am in "getting there", though that's mostly when others are waiting on me and my experience isn't "all about me".
To give it some perspective...
To me, everything and anything I'm doing while in a MMORPG is part of the experience, from character creation to the last time I've logged out. For example, if I'm riding on my chocobo from Ul'dah to Gridania in XIV... that is part of the experience to me. I'm taking in the scenery and music, I'm chatting in LS/GC with friends, I'm seeing what's going on around me... maybe I come across a FATE or two and decide to drop in and participate before continuing on my way. That is all fun to me.
In the decade plus that I've played MMOs, I have had countless experiences and encounters that came about completely by chance because I was traveling by foot/mount, and could not have happened any other way. I've met people I may never have met otherwise, some of whom became really good RL friends - all on the basis of a random chance encounter while running from "point A" to "point B". I could have experienced none of those events if I were just teleporting/fast traveling everywhere.
So, I understand that you may not see the value in slow travel, and may not consider it fun. That's fine. However, you need to open that mind of yours a bit - well, quite a lot actually - and understand that there's a lot you don't know and can not account for, nor judge, in your own view. To dismiss others who disagree out-of-hand, simply because "you don't think it's so" is just ridiculous.
And of course, the subject of "fun" in the context of a MMO goes far beyond just travel. It applies to everything a given title has to offer.
Seeking out the objective was never a satisfying problem. It's become even more useless nowadays with wikis' prevalence. Basically if a game tried to have finding the quest location be gameplay, what would actually happen is the gameplay would be alt-tabbing, checking the wiki, and alt-tabbing back. Which is obviously not a particularly interesting sort of game.
I agree, it's not satisfying to open a Wiki guide and find the solution to an objective in a MMO.
That's why I don't do it, except in very rare situations. I try to solve it myself. If I get completely stuck, I'll ask others I know in-game if they're familiar with it and can provide a clue. If it's not something I need/want to get done right then, I'll set it aside and come back to it later. If I'm just that stuck on it, I will occasionally crack open a guide and look for a clue to get past the step I'm on... then close the browser and proceed to do the rest myself.
Opening a Wiki and looking up the solution to something is a choice. The game doesn't make someone alt-tab out. They choose to do that.
I'm going to guess you're the type who'd be alt-tabbing constantly? If so, well, that's your problem, not the game's.
Don't blame the game for something you have 100% agency over.
Nobody's "just enjoying the payoff". They're enjoying the gameplay. You know, the actual gameplay. Not those 2 minutes watching your character's run animation. That's not gameplay. The gameplay is when you have some skills and pressing them in the right order will make you live, and the wrong order will cause you to die (or at least be a lot slower at the task; most quests don't have very good difficulty balancing to threaten players with failure nowadays and that's a legit problem.)
Again, you're attempting to speak for everyone, and you simply can't.
I already explained how "those two minutes watching your character run" can bring its own form of reward and entertainment, often in ways you could not have encountered otherwise.
Well you're certainly free to attempt to make a game which deliberately dilutes its own content behind giant non-gameplay timesinks like travel, and see how that turns out for you. The reality is that if everyone generally enjoys A, B, and C, you are not going to make a better game by removing B and C and creating a 5-hour wait to reach activity A.
It's not a 'weasel word' to use the term overwhelmingly. There is a type of fun found in Farmville and a type of fun from watching movies, and these types of entertainment are part of games at times. But the #1 star of the show is pattern mastery. It wasn't a quote. It was a summary of A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. Read it. (Koster was lead designer of UO.)
Look it's not cynical to call it delayed gratification. Games are about gratification, and providing the most enjoyable parts immediately is how you avoid deliberately wasting players' time. Anything else is delayed gratification -- intentionally hiding the fun behind arbitrary timesinks.
The ironic part is these arbitrary timesinks were deliberately created to sell subscriptions for more months. And here I am a designer telling you it's bad game design and you're the player saying you want more of that, when literally the only reason it showed up in these games was to milk more money from the subscription model.
Saying that travel is boring non-gameplay in nearly every game isn't 'weasel words'. It's the simple truth. Players enjoy gameplay, and gameplay is decisions, and travel in most games is nearly devoid of decisions (and the few there are, are very repetitive.) Although I may have to think on this to remind myself which games actually have enjoyable travel. FTL was one that I was thinking of, but now I realize it's really just teleporting immediately between events and shops and combat (between all the interesting decisions the game offers, basically) and no actual travel is experienced. So even though the entire game is ostensibly about travel, it's actually not about travel at all.
As for wiki-checking, games exist in our world. Our world has wikis. So any feature which rewards wiki-checking is a feature where the designer is essentially saying "...and at this point in gameplay, I want players to alt-tab to check for a map coordinate." Which is generally a very stupid design decision which shouldn't be made. Sure a handful of players may deliberately (or through incompetence) choose to solve things the slow and inaccurate way, but we can't design the game purely for those players. I mean there's always going to be a problem for players to solve, but it's up to the game whether that problem strongly rewards alt-tabbing or simply rewards good solid play.
As for the last bit, explaining how waiting can be its own reward doesn't magically solve the problem. The reality is this:
Travel is non-gameplay, and therefore less interesting to virtually everyone (since people play games for gameplay.)
None of the activities you talk about doing while traveling require traveling. You can literally pursue those activities at will.
So those activities do not justify non-gameplay travel, which means there's really nothing beneficial to travel at all (and in games where things need to take time to move places, the player needn't be forced to sit there and watch; they should be freed up to do something else.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It is not diluted for me, so your premise of having fun diluted for everyone is false. You are arguing against a perspective that you appear to be incapable of understanding. Open your mind a little, not everyone is going to see and experience things as you do. I can see your point of view, why can't you see others'? It is interesting how you allow for only your point of view and experience to be the correct one.
What if you have quests that require visiting different places in the world? Or localized economy where you need to ferry goods around? Players who gets immersed in travelling manually would be at a disadvantage. Player B isn't happy, and if he travels through the world he wont meet as many people along the way plus he has the nagging idea in the back of his mind that he could be doing this more efficiently by porting.
So the real solution is to acknowledge that we have players that value different game play styles. One group wants to get into the loot and combat and does not want anything in their way. The other wants a world, with loot and combat in it, and values the "world-feeling" above all. This is not a "side-feature" to him but possibly the main draw of the game.
The key is that Player B will always enjoy the game somewhat. He'll be presented with teleport vs. slow travel, and by choosing slow travel it means his enjoyment of that immersion outweighs the disadvantages. He gets some enjoyment still.
Whereas if Player A is forced to slow-travel, he gets no enjoyment at all.
A lot of things like localized economies can also be had without forcing players to do the lugging around. If I can give my NPC servant orders to move things from City A to City B, then that frees me up to engage in the decision-heavy portions of the game rather than manually traveling places. I actually think more games should do this, as localized economies in certain forms can be a lot of fun -- but never if the player is required to manually cart things themself. Obviously the speed and capacity of NPCs would be tightly controlled in a way that achieved the right feel of the localized economy, including the fact that only NPCs would be capable of moving these things around.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
This isn't a subjective thing. If a given activity is rated Fun on a scale of Fun-to-Not-Fun, then forcing players to wait an hour for that activity isn't going to magically make it more fun. For anyone.
Wrong. 100% wrong.
I know you believe otherwise, Axe, but you do not hold a monopoly on what "fun" is for everyone.
I've played MMORPGs too long, and have seen far too many types of players, who have enjoyed, or disliked, any number of activities, to varying degrees, for various reasons. Some people loved camping rare mobs in FFXI. I mean, they did it constantly. If they were online, they were trying to find out what rare mob had its spawn window opening soon. The more contested the better. Because, they enjoyed the competition of being the one to get the claim/kill.
Yes.. to them... that was fun. To others? It was like watching paint dry. To others, it was fun in small doses. To others, it was something done out of necessity - because they wanted a drop it had, etc. Each of them had their own subjective idea of how fun camping rare mobs was or wasn't, and their level of participation in that activity reflected their feelings about it. For myself, I camped a rare mob maybe 4 times in the 7+ years I played. I just wasn't that interested most of the time because none of those rare drops were necessary to enjoy or do well in the game, and there were other activities I enjoyed more.
Many folks loved doing Dynamis. It was the highlight of their week. I didn't enjoy it at all, so I rarely ever participated. When I did, it was to help out 'cause they needed a few more people. My fun came from helping others out, not the activity itself.
The same goes for open world PvP, leveling up by mob grinding, crafting, harvesting, or doing any other kind of activity that a person may or may not wish to participate in.
The idea of "what is fun", or "how fun something is" is subjective. Period. End of discussion.
Fun happens overwhelmingly due to pattern mastery (Koster, 2003) which doesn't happen in the empty non-gameplay between the actual gameplay. So it actually is diluted. For everyone.
First, I detect weasel word usage when you say "overwhelmingly".
That said... Please provide a link to the full article you pulled that quote from, because I have a feeling you're taking it out of context, and engaging in a bit of confirmation bias.
Fun can be measured for anything you're doing. The down-time between content can be spent having fun while chatting with other players, joking around, etc. To those who enjoy socializing and joking around with fellow players, that is still fun , and it's still happening inside of a game.It's socializing, which is a huge part - or used to be - a huge part of what MMORPGs were. It's one of the cornerstones of a strong community, which older MMOs were known for, and newer MMOs all but completely lack.
Why is delayed gratification cynical? One person uses "instant gratification" in an attempt to be negative, so the only contrasting stance is obviously that that person believes delayed (non-instant) gratification is better. Straightforward and logical.
Seriously? You're playing this game now? The whole "I'll ignore what you actually said, so I can argue with what you didn't say" routine?
Your depiction of "delayed gratification" is cynical. Not the "delayed gratification" itself; I explained how/why it could take time to achieve a goal, and it was nothing to do with how you cynically described it.
You can talk about making the journey interesting, but the reality is travel is not interesting in nearly every game. So any idea that makes travel contain as many interesting decisions as regular content is just theoretical (or exists in the handful of non-MMOs which do manage to make travel interesting.)
And here you go with sweeping generalizations and weasel words again.
What is interesting to one person, may be boring as hell to someone else. Travel can be very fun, for someone who values the potential experiences to be had along the way. I prefer to go places on foot, or by mount if it's a really long distance (20+ minutes away), as much as possible, because I enjoy actually being out in the world, seeing the sights, maybe finding some out of the way places, or seeing something interesting going on. I can enjoy none of those things - in the context of traveling on foot/mount - if I'm just teleporting everywhere. Slower travel can be content in itself, and it can unexpectedly lead to content as well. Yes, that is something I enjoy... Your guffaws and protests notwithstanding. There are plenty of people I've seen and met and known personally in my time playing MMOs who've felt the same.
Do I sometimes prefer fast travel? Sure. Sometimes I'm more interested in "being there" than I am in "getting there", though that's mostly when others are waiting on me and my experience isn't "all about me".
To give it some perspective...
To me, everything and anything I'm doing while in a MMORPG is part of the experience, from character creation to the last time I've logged out. For example, if I'm riding on my chocobo from Ul'dah to Gridania in XIV... that is part of the experience to me. I'm taking in the scenery and music, I'm chatting in LS/GC with friends, I'm seeing what's going on around me... maybe I come across a FATE or two and decide to drop in and participate before continuing on my way. That is all fun to me.
In the decade plus that I've played MMOs, I have had countless experiences and encounters that came about completely by chance because I was traveling by foot/mount, and could not have happened any other way. I've met people I may never have met otherwise, some of whom became really good RL friends - all on the basis of a random chance encounter while running from "point A" to "point B". I could have experienced none of those events if I were just teleporting/fast traveling everywhere.
So, I understand that you may not see the value in slow travel, and may not consider it fun. That's fine. However, you need to open that mind of yours a bit - well, quite a lot actually - and understand that there's a lot you don't know and can not account for, nor judge, in your own view. To dismiss others who disagree out-of-hand, simply because "you don't think it's so" is just ridiculous.
And of course, the subject of "fun" in the context of a MMO goes far beyond just travel. It applies to everything a given title has to offer.
Seeking out the objective was never a satisfying problem. It's become even more useless nowadays with wikis' prevalence. Basically if a game tried to have finding the quest location be gameplay, what would actually happen is the gameplay would be alt-tabbing, checking the wiki, and alt-tabbing back. Which is obviously not a particularly interesting sort of game.
I agree, it's not satisfying to open a Wiki guide and find the solution to an objective in a MMO.
That's why I don't do it, except in very rare situations. I try to solve it myself. If I get completely stuck, I'll ask others I know in-game if they're familiar with it and can provide a clue. If it's not something I need/want to get done right then, I'll set it aside and come back to it later. If I'm just that stuck on it, I will occasionally crack open a guide and look for a clue to get past the step I'm on... then close the browser and proceed to do the rest myself.
Opening a Wiki and looking up the solution to something is a choice. The game doesn't make someone alt-tab out. They choose to do that.
I'm going to guess you're the type who'd be alt-tabbing constantly? If so, well, that's your problem, not the game's.
Don't blame the game for something you have 100% agency over.
Nobody's "just enjoying the payoff". They're enjoying the gameplay. You know, the actual gameplay. Not those 2 minutes watching your character's run animation. That's not gameplay. The gameplay is when you have some skills and pressing them in the right order will make you live, and the wrong order will cause you to die (or at least be a lot slower at the task; most quests don't have very good difficulty balancing to threaten players with failure nowadays and that's a legit problem.)
Again, you're attempting to speak for everyone, and you simply can't.
I already explained how "those two minutes watching your character run" can bring its own form of reward and entertainment, often in ways you could not have encountered otherwise.
Well you're certainly free to attempt to make a game which deliberately dilutes its own content behind giant non-gameplay timesinks like travel, and see how that turns out for you. The reality is that if everyone generally enjoys A, B, and C, you are not going to make a better game by removing B and C and creating a 5-hour wait to reach activity A.
It's not a 'weasel word' to use the term overwhelmingly. There is a type of fun found in Farmville and a type of fun from watching movies, and these types of entertainment are part of games at times. But the #1 star of the show is pattern mastery. It wasn't a quote. It was a summary of A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. Read it. (Koster was lead designer of UO.)
Look it's not cynical to call it delayed gratification. Games are about gratification, and providing the most enjoyable parts immediately is how you avoid deliberately wasting players' time. Anything else is delayed gratification -- intentionally hiding the fun behind arbitrary timesinks.
The ironic part is these arbitrary timesinks were deliberately created to sell subscriptions for more months. And here I am a designer telling you it's bad game design and you're the player saying you want more of that, when literally the only reason it showed up in these games was to milk more money from the subscription model.
Saying that travel is boring non-gameplay in nearly every game isn't 'weasel words'. It's the simple truth. Players enjoy gameplay, and gameplay is decisions, and travel in most games is nearly devoid of decisions (and the few there are, are very repetitive.) Although I may have to think on this to remind myself which games actually have enjoyable travel. FTL was one that I was thinking of, but now I realize it's really just teleporting immediately between events and shops and combat (between all the interesting decisions the game offers, basically) and no actual travel is experienced. So even though the entire game is ostensibly about travel, it's actually not about travel at all.
As for wiki-checking, games exist in our world. Our world has wikis. So any feature which rewards wiki-checking is a feature where the designer is essentially saying "...and at this point in gameplay, I want players to alt-tab to check for a map coordinate." Which is generally a very stupid design decision which shouldn't be made. Sure a handful of players may deliberately (or through incompetence) choose to solve things the slow and inaccurate way, but we can't design the game purely for those players. I mean there's always going to be a problem for players to solve, but it's up to the game whether that problem strongly rewards alt-tabbing or simply rewards good solid play.
As for the last bit, explaining how waiting can be its own reward doesn't magically solve the problem. The reality is this:
Travel is non-gameplay, and therefore less interesting to virtually everyone (since people play games for gameplay.)
None of the activities you talk about doing while traveling require traveling. You can literally pursue those activities at will.
So those activities do not justify non-gameplay travel, which means there's really nothing beneficial to travel at all (and in games where things need to take time to move places, the player needn't be forced to sit there and watch; they should be freed up to do something else.)
Fun is subjective. I don't really enjoy gaining new items much when playing games anymore. Generally the new items don't matter because the game is to easy already. There is no need to get items which boost your stats or give you more damage. You could probably complete most of these games solo content with nothing but starter gear. I wonder if anyone has actually tried this before.
Traveling is a lot of fun to me. I can tell you why that is. Part of it is because there is an element of not knowing what to expect. Something dangerous might pop out and attack you. Something you might not be able to handle.
Large forests, deserts, plains, etc. are exciting to encounter when you don't know they are there. Remove your GPS and just go off in search of something and see what happens. Probe different areas and see what you can accomplish. I believe exploration has always been part of homo sapiens life. They have traveled from Africa to different continents. In America the settlers traveled from east to west of the continent. It was an Unknown and Dangerous place. People still wanted to travel because it was exciting to see the unknown and there was hope of a better life. You could say it's in most humans blood to want to explore new places.
Generally RPGs are based on adventures. I don't see how you can have an adventure if you are instantly moved to each dungeon or instantly moved to a separated PvP area. Adventure requires that you explore the unknown and face many hardships on you journey. You might get lost, get ambushed, run into some fog/weather condition, encounter dangerous creatures in the night, find something unexpected, etc.
The question I have is are people really having fun in these games. To me it's impossible to have fun when you can't really fail. If the only parts of the game that are important are the segregated PvE group/raid and the PvP esport then why bother with the single player outside world portion of the game at all? To me none of those activities are fun. Either they are about endlessly killing other player over and over again without any real purpose or grinding for loot upgrades over and over again. This defeats the purpose of the game IMO. The purpose being to go on an adventure.
I am all for conveniences but it's like everyone wants an instance lobby game these days.
[quote] A lot of things like localized economies can also be had without forcing players to do the lugging around. If I can give my NPC servant orders to move things from City A to City B, then that frees me up to engage in the decision-heavy portions of the game rather than manually traveling places. I [/quote]
A provide that convenience at a cost as well. Instead of being a slave you pay them. Don't want to possibly lose a portion of your wares to bandits? Have to pay security too. Don't want to pay anyone? Then hoof it.
Like others have said, there is no right or wrong way. Its preference. Everyone has different goals in life and in games.
However, if you cannot even understand how another can enjoy something that takes time, thats a symptom of a bigger problem.
"Good things come to those who wait."
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
"The salt of patience seasons everything."
"You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction."
"Nothing worthwhile comes easily"
It feels better to buy something with money you worked for than money you were given. Food tastes better after a hard day's work. These are things people know if they've lived life. Its one thing to want to spend your leisure time doing something shallow and fun, but if you cannot understand these principles and why they're desirable in a game, its because you've probably spent your life having things given to you rather than earning them yourself.
Like others have said, there is no right or wrong way. Its preference. Everyone has different goals in life and in games.
However, if you cannot even understand how another can enjoy something that takes time, thats a symptom of a bigger problem.
"Good things come to those who wait."
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
"The salt of patience seasons everything."
"You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction."
"Nothing worthwhile comes easily"
It feels better to buy something with money you worked for than money you were given. Food tastes better after a hard day's work. These are things people know if they've lived life. Its one thing to want to spend your leisure time doing something shallow and fun, but if you cannot understand these principles and why they're desirable in a game, its because you've probably spent your life having things given to you rather than earning them yourself.
Wouldn't this be just as subjective as goals in MMOs?
For instance a lot of people work a desk job in this day and age. Many probably go to work and collect a pay check. They use this to buy items. Weather you actually earned that meal is very subjective. I go to work and collect a pay check. I work hard when it's needed, but I can't say I feel like I deserve anything in life because of doing that.
On the flip side if you lived outside, went hunting, grew your own vegetables, built your own well, made your own house, and built your own tools you could say that you earned everything you have. How many people actually do that though? We are talking about a society where people consume massive amounts of entertainment.
Fun is subjective. I don't really enjoy gaining new items much when playing games anymore. Generally the new items don't matter because the game is to easy already. There is no need to get items which boost your stats or give you more damage. You could probably complete most of these games solo content with nothing but starter gear. I wonder if anyone has actually tried this before.
Traveling is a lot of fun to me. I can tell you why that is. Part of it is because there is an element of not knowing what to expect. Something dangerous might pop out and attack you. Something you might not be able to handle.
Large forests, deserts, plains, etc. are exciting to encounter when you don't know they are there. Remove your GPS and just go off in search of something and see what happens. Probe different areas and see what you can accomplish. I believe exploration has always been part of homo sapiens life. They have traveled from Africa to different continents. In America the settlers traveled from east to west of the continent. It was an Unknown and Dangerous place. People still wanted to travel because it was exciting to see the unknown and there was hope of a better life. You could say it's in most humans blood to want to explore new places.
Generally RPGs are based on adventures. I don't see how you can have an adventure if you are instantly moved to each dungeon or instantly moved to a separated PvP area. Adventure requires that you explore the unknown and face many hardships on you journey. You might get lost, get ambushed, run into some fog/weather condition, encounter dangerous creatures in the night, find something unexpected, etc.
The question I have is are people really having fun in these games. To me it's impossible to have fun when you can't really fail. If the only parts of the game that are important are the segregated PvE group/raid and the PvP esport then why bother with the single player outside world portion of the game at all? To me none of those activities are fun. Either they are about endlessly killing other player over and over again without any real purpose or grinding for loot upgrades over and over again. This defeats the purpose of the game IMO. The purpose being to go on an adventure.
The problem is any benefit to travel can be achieved other ways:
Want to be uncertain what you'll experience next? Then have gameplay like D3 where encounters are heavily randomized!
Want to explore? Then explore!
Want to socialize? Then socialize!
Want to see cool sights? Stop and look around!
Want to be immersed by manually running? Then don't take the teleport.
No gameplay benefit exclusively requires slow travel. So the design simply doesn't justify itself.
Lord of the Rings was an adventure, wasn't it? Did Tolkien detail every single second of the year-long journey? Of course not. He skipped uneventful travel which didn't serve a purpose in some way (though I feel he's a worse author than many when it comes to skipping uneventful things.) Skipping means he instantly moved you to each important scene. In that respect, good narrative design is the same as good movie design is the same as good game design.
As for your last bit, I agree that MMORPGs can do a better job of providing challenges. Challenge shouldn't only exist at endgame. It should be treated like City of Heroes treated it -- there's a giant expanse of progression to be had, and you have a difficulty slider which determines how hard the challenges are, and the higher you set that the faster you progress. You don't even technically need a difficulty slider to achieve this, since RPGs tend to have all the monsters of varying levels in-game already and you can just better support fighting monsters above your level, and ensure the rewards more than compensate for the added time it will take to kill those monsters. (If it takes 50% longer to kill a mob 5 levels above you, then you'd need to earn at least 50% more XP from killing that mob to just break even. Ideally you'd earn more like 250% more XP (which means that for facing very hard challenges consistently, you'd advance overall about 2x as fast as someone grinding easy mobs.)
But even though none of this is all that complicated to implement, City of Heroes is the only game I know of to have actually done it and made self-challenges worthwhile. Everyone else is content to let "endlessly grind these easy things to level" be the primary way to advance, which is really just outright worse (because it means the game has a fairly fixed difficulty, which means it's too easy for a lot of players.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Like others have said, there is no right or wrong way. Its preference. Everyone has different goals in life and in games.
However, if you cannot even understand how another can enjoy something that takes time, thats a symptom of a bigger problem.
"Good things come to those who wait."
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
"The salt of patience seasons everything."
"You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction."
"Nothing worthwhile comes easily"
It feels better to buy something with money you worked for than money you were given. Food tastes better after a hard day's work. These are things people know if they've lived life. Its one thing to want to spend your leisure time doing something shallow and fun, but if you cannot understand these principles and why they're desirable in a game, its because you've probably spent your life having things given to you rather than earning them yourself.
Wouldn't this be just as subjective as goals in MMOs?
For instance a lot of people work a desk job in this day and age. Many probably go to work and collect a pay check. They use this to buy items. Weather you actually earned that meal is very subjective. I go to work and collect a pay check. I work hard when it's needed, but I can't say I feel like I deserve anything in life because of doing that.
On the flip side if you lived outside, went hunting, grew your own vegetables, built your own well, made your own house, and built your own tools you could say that you earned everything you have. How many people actually do that though? We are talking about a society where people consume massive amounts of entertainment.
Outside perception is irrelevant. Work, time and patience are constants. Maybe one man's desk job is as arduous as another man's life as a frontiersman.
Fun is subjective. I don't really enjoy gaining new items much when playing games anymore. Generally the new items don't matter because the game is to easy already. There is no need to get items which boost your stats or give you more damage. You could probably complete most of these games solo content with nothing but starter gear. I wonder if anyone has actually tried this before.
Traveling is a lot of fun to me. I can tell you why that is. Part of it is because there is an element of not knowing what to expect. Something dangerous might pop out and attack you. Something you might not be able to handle.
Large forests, deserts, plains, etc. are exciting to encounter when you don't know they are there. Remove your GPS and just go off in search of something and see what happens. Probe different areas and see what you can accomplish. I believe exploration has always been part of homo sapiens life. They have traveled from Africa to different continents. In America the settlers traveled from east to west of the continent. It was an Unknown and Dangerous place. People still wanted to travel because it was exciting to see the unknown and there was hope of a better life. You could say it's in most humans blood to want to explore new places.
Generally RPGs are based on adventures. I don't see how you can have an adventure if you are instantly moved to each dungeon or instantly moved to a separated PvP area. Adventure requires that you explore the unknown and face many hardships on you journey. You might get lost, get ambushed, run into some fog/weather condition, encounter dangerous creatures in the night, find something unexpected, etc.
The question I have is are people really having fun in these games. To me it's impossible to have fun when you can't really fail. If the only parts of the game that are important are the segregated PvE group/raid and the PvP esport then why bother with the single player outside world portion of the game at all? To me none of those activities are fun. Either they are about endlessly killing other player over and over again without any real purpose or grinding for loot upgrades over and over again. This defeats the purpose of the game IMO. The purpose being to go on an adventure.
The problem is any benefit to travel can be achieved other ways:
Want to be uncertain what you'll experience next? Then have gameplay like D3 where encounters are heavily randomized!
Want to explore? Then explore!
Want to socialize? Then socialize!
Want to see cool sights? Stop and look around!
Want to be immersed by manually running? Then don't take the teleport.
No gameplay benefit exclusively requires slow travel. So the design simply doesn't justify itself.
Lord of the Rings was an adventure, wasn't it? Did Tolkien detail every single second of the year-long journey? Of course not. He skipped uneventful travel which didn't serve a purpose in some way (though I feel he's a worse author than many when it comes to skipping uneventful things.) Skipping means he instantly moved you to each important scene. In that respect, good narrative design is the same as good movie design is the same as good game design.
This is where you err. For the sake of telling a story, it may be good to skip the monotonous details. To live a story, you experience everything in between.
Thats the difference in you and the people you're arguing with. You want Mordor to come to you, while we want to experience everything in between.
Like others have said, there is no right or wrong way. Its preference. Everyone has different goals in life and in games.
However, if you cannot even understand how another can enjoy something that takes time, thats a symptom of a bigger problem.
"Good things come to those who wait."
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
"The salt of patience seasons everything."
"You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction."
"Nothing worthwhile comes easily"
It feels better to buy something with money you worked for than money you were given. Food tastes better after a hard day's work. These are things people know if they've lived life. Its one thing to want to spend your leisure time doing something shallow and fun, but if you cannot understand these principles and why they're desirable in a game, its because you've probably spent your life having things given to you rather than earning them yourself.
Wouldn't this be just as subjective as goals in MMOs?
For instance a lot of people work a desk job in this day and age. Many probably go to work and collect a pay check. They use this to buy items. Weather you actually earned that meal is very subjective. I go to work and collect a pay check. I work hard when it's needed, but I can't say I feel like I deserve anything in life because of doing that.
On the flip side if you lived outside, went hunting, grew your own vegetables, built your own well, made your own house, and built your own tools you could say that you earned everything you have. How many people actually do that though? We are talking about a society where people consume massive amounts of entertainment.
Outside perception is irrelevant. Work, time and patience are constants. Maybe one man's desk job is as arduous as another man's life as a frontiersman.
I would say that as long as it makes you happy. To me all achievements in life are fairly hollow. People just like to think they are achieving something to make themselves feel better. It's not much different then developers setting goals for you in a game. You do feel better when you can stand on your own two feet, but weather or not you are standing on your own two feet is generally determined by what society perceives as standing on your own two feet. You are generally always at the mercy of society and what it believes is wright and wrong.
What he doesn't care to understand (and the reason everyone blocks him) is that people who actually played EQ don't generally regard camping mobs as the worst or weakest aspect of the game. Compared to modern alternatives to camping, I'd take it in a second. The dungeons were huge and dangerous. The challenge and reward of actually getting a rare item from a rare spawn was meaningful and exciting. If some people would rather go into their lobby games and dial-a-dungeon instance with a bunch of strangers who seldom, if ever, communicate with each other because there is generally no reason to, thats their prerogative. For those of us who enjoy contested open world content and the opportunity to meet people and work together or against other players is what made it fun.
That's one of the real issues with Nari. Although I am sometimes in agreement with his point of views, it's the lack of respect for those with opposing point of views that probably make him unpopular/blocked as you'd put it. I dislike lobby games though.
Whether or not he cares to actually discuss things here or just likes to post out of boredom/baiting is totally irrelevant to me.
He's like a guy who goes to a Chinese buffet and doesn't like Chinese food or buffets but man does he like single slices of pizza and you bet everyone there is going to know how much he likes pizza and doesn't care for Chinese. On top of that he thinks single servings are buffet and pizza is Chinese.
I'll never block him because he says some of the most ridiculous, laughable things on this forum.
He's like a guy who goes to a Chinese buffet and doesn't like Chinese food or buffets but man does he like single slices of pizza and you bet everyone there is going to know how much he likes pizza and doesn't care for Chinese. On top of that he thinks single servings are buffet and pizza is Chinese.
I'll never block him because he says some of the most ridiculous, laughable things on this forum.
Great analogy .. but i think you miss the point.
It is more like Chinese buffet restaurant starts to serve pizzas, and that is why I show up. And I don't see a problem, if Chinese buffet serves pizzas, to talk about how great pizzas are.
(BTW, may be we should switch the example to a pizza place serving japanese ramen .. since i don't like pizza that much)
Like others have said, there is no right or wrong way. Its preference. Everyone has different goals in life and in games.
However, if you cannot even understand how another can enjoy something that takes time, thats a symptom of a bigger problem.
"Good things come to those who wait."
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
"The salt of patience seasons everything."
"You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction."
"Nothing worthwhile comes easily"
It feels better to buy something with money you worked for than money you were given. Food tastes better after a hard day's work. These are things people know if they've lived life. Its one thing to want to spend your leisure time doing something shallow and fun, but if you cannot understand these principles and why they're desirable in a game, its because you've probably spent your life having things given to you rather than earning them yourself.
You cannot beat the final WOW boss of the final raid on Mythic difficulty without a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of skill. So none of the quotes above fail to be true of WOW.
Except the shortcut one (which is the worst quote, because any place worth going is worth creating shortcuts to; it's why we have roads, you know.)
Stating that everyone has different goals is great. It's literally the strongest case for my point!
With fast-travel, both types of players get what they want. It's win-win.
Without fast-travel, only the slow-travel player gets what they want.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
How about if the whole castle just randomly spawned somewhere in the world? Then when you beat it, it despawned only to respawn at some point at a different random location? Oh and you need to find a key to get in, and maybe a map to take you there.
At least *I* hope that is where things are eventually moving.
... I know somewhere inside you that you think this is what you want, but does this create a sense of world ? I am fine with having a living world that changes, but have static places within that world anchor it to some sort of reality. Content doesn't have to be fresh everyday to be rewarding.
Like others have said, there is no right or wrong way. Its preference. Everyone has different goals in life and in games.
However, if you cannot even understand how another can enjoy something that takes time, thats a symptom of a bigger problem.
"Good things come to those who wait."
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
"The salt of patience seasons everything."
"You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction."
"Nothing worthwhile comes easily"
It feels better to buy something with money you worked for than money you were given. Food tastes better after a hard day's work. These are things people know if they've lived life. Its one thing to want to spend your leisure time doing something shallow and fun, but if you cannot understand these principles and why they're desirable in a game, its because you've probably spent your life having things given to you rather than earning them yourself.
You cannot beat the final WOW boss of the final raid on Mythic difficulty without a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of skill. So none of the quotes above fail to be true of WOW.
Except the shortcut one (which is the worst quote, because any place worth going is worth creating shortcuts to; it's why we have roads, you know.)
Stating that everyone has different goals is great. It's literally the strongest case for my point!
With fast-travel, both types of players get what they want. It's win-win.
Without fast-travel, only the slow-travel player gets what they want.
You're still not getting it (spoiler: you never will).
Thats great that a WoW boss is difficult. I'm sure many of us would find that fun. The problem to us is that the rest of the game lacks that same difficulty and sense of accomplishment. When we leave the dungeon we don't want to go back into a menu and queue up for something else. We want to fight our way back to the city to repair our armor and buy our rations.
What if you have quests that require visiting different places in the world? Or localized economy where you need to ferry goods around? Players who gets immersed in travelling manually would be at a disadvantage. Player B isn't happy, and if he travels through the world he wont meet as many people along the way plus he has the nagging idea in the back of his mind that he could be doing this more efficiently by porting.
So the real solution is to acknowledge that we have players that value different game play styles. One group wants to get into the loot and combat and does not want anything in their way. The other wants a world, with loot and combat in it, and values the "world-feeling" above all. This is not a "side-feature" to him but possibly the main draw of the game.
If he cares about efficiencies that much, may be he should port. And I don't see why other people who like to port need to meet player B just to make him happy. And if there are enough who really like "immersion" enough, player B will have people to meet.
There is no real solution. Game design is driven by supply & demand. If a dev wants to target an audience who like fast travel, you just have to either ignore the efficiency issue, or play another game.
BTW, I thought people like slow leveling here .. i.e. low efficiencies. Isn't that the perfect combo? Slow travel *and* slow leveling by choice. What is the complaint again? If you want to race others to level, may be immersion & slow travel is not for you.
Thats great that a WoW boss is difficult. I'm sure many of us would find that fun. The problem to us is that the rest of the game lacks that same difficulty and sense of accomplishment. When we leave the dungeon we don't want to go back into a menu and queue up for something else. We want to fight our way back to the city to repair our armor and buy our rations.
So you like part of the game, and not another part.
Isn't the solution simple? Skip the part you do not like, and play the part you do.
If most of the audience don't want to bother to fight back to the city, blizz is not going to put that in. So either you have to live with it, or play other games.
Games are for entertainment. If they are not entertaining you they are not fulfilling their purpose.
Delayed fun in a game is never ever good design. Ever.
The dev has to know the audience they are targeting. The fun in that have is targeted to that audience. Putting in activities that delay the fun for your targeted audience is bad design.
So the devs need to design the game for whoever their audience is. The rule still applies. Delayed fun in a game is bad design.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Originally posted by Pratt2112 You left out a couple key bits in your statements there.That is, I'm assuming you weren't actually trying to speak for everyone, and merely forgot to indicate that you spoke purely for yourself.And it isn't about "delaying gratification". That's a rather cynical way to characterize it.It's about making the trip/journey to achieving that gratification - whatever form it comes in - interesting and challenging enough so that when you do finally reach that final objective, and return to turn in the quest, there's actually something to feel gratified about. How long that takes depends on a number of factors. For me, chasing !s, arrows on a map and objectives that sparkle so it's impossible to miss them robs the experience of any gratification it may have provided otherwise, were I actually given the opportunity to seek out and solve the objective myself, unassisted.The idea of playing any game is to have fun, to enjoy the whole experience.. not just the payoff. If someone feels the content along the way is just "dragging out the time it takes to get gratification", then I'd say they need to re-evaluate their choice of entertainment. They're kinda missing the point.
This isn't a subjective thing. If a given activity is rated Fun on a scale of Fun-to-Not-Fun, then forcing players to wait an hour for that activity isn't going to magically make it more fun. For anyone.Fun happens overwhelmingly due to pattern mastery (Koster, 2003) which doesn't happen in the empty non-gameplay between the actual gameplay. So it actually is diluted. For everyone.Why is delayed gratification cynical? One person uses "instant gratification" in an attempt to be negative, so the only contrasting stance is obviously that that person believes delayed (non-instant) gratification is better. Straightforward and logical.You can talk about making the journey interesting, but the reality is travel is not interesting in nearly every game. So any idea that makes travel contain as many interesting decisions as regular content is just theoretical (or exists in the handful of non-MMOs which do manage to make travel interesting.)Seeking out the objective was never a satisfying problem. It's become even more useless nowadays with wikis' prevalence. Basically if a game tried to have finding the quest location be gameplay, what would actually happen is the gameplay would be alt-tabbing, checking the wiki, and alt-tabbing back. Which is obviously not a particularly interesting sort of game.Nobody's "just enjoying the payoff". They're enjoying the gameplay. You know, the actual gameplay. Not those 2 minutes watching your character's run animation. That's not gameplay. The gameplay is when you have some skills and pressing them in the right order will make you live, and the wrong order will cause you to die (or at least be a lot slower at the task; most quests don't have very good difficulty balancing to threaten players with failure nowadays and that's a legit problem.)
Wow... so "fun" is no longer subjective? Hold the presses! Axehilt has ALL the answers, for everyone!
First off, I do not recall ANY MMORPG *I* played that had me "waiting around for an hour" with nothing to do. Even during that oh-so-dreaded "downtime" when the group is recovering from a fight, or waiting for our turn to get into a group we chatted... TALKED to each other. I swear, some players... If the game is not forcing you to constantly click buttons, you are bored.
Second, Those "boring" empty non-play areas, things can and do happen. Talk about not seeing the forest through the trees. Other players inhabit these boring, non-action areas. This is where community comes in.
Next in line: Instant Gratification is a slippery slope, just like getting high from drugs. Soon, the player can not be "gratified" fast enough. What works is variety. A little instant here, a little delayed there. That way, we do not get "taught" a pattern to expect.
Travel: For YOU (and many others it seems), travel is not fun. Gratz. You have the games you desire. For those who actually enjoy the journey and not "just the end", too bad, so sad. Again, why play MMOs? MOBAs are more to your idea of fun. No "boring travel" involved there. In one aspect, *players* make the journey boring or interesting. You have no desire to make it fun, so it is not. Others try to make it fun and succeed more often then not. I totally understand why you find it boring. Do not try to belittle those who do find fun in travel.
The rest, you keep on proving that "fun" is VERY subjective. And "fun gameplay" is defined by each individual player, or do you pretend to *know* what everyone wants here, too? Majority of MMO players today? Yea, you speak for the majority. NOT everyone. Stop trying to act like you do.
If you want to argue business sense and I have no rebuttal. It would be stupid to not try to please the biggest crowd, if making money is your bottom line. I just wander what would happen if indeed, some company decided to be different. How successful would that MMORPG be? We may never know, thanks to players just like you who do NOT want worlds in which to adventure, but rather lobby based action combat games where you get to mash buttons/keys the whole time while logged in.
Thanks for ruining the genre.
- 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
This is where you err. For the sake of telling a story, it may be good to skip the monotonous details. To live a story, you experience everything in between.
Thats the difference in you and the people you're arguing with. You want Mordor to come to you, while we want to experience everything in between.
In WOW I do not proceed from the character creation screen to the final Mythic raid boss at the very end. So no, Mordor doesn't come to me. I work my way through all the meaningful, eventful experiences between the start and the end.
Just like any good entertainment, it doesn't deliberately waste my time. And I still have a fantastic story to live through -- certainly much better than the diluted one that someone manually traveling will experience.
And remember it can't be stated enough that systems like these were deliberately implemented to keep players subscribing longer. In other threads, players are concerned about selling cosmetic items being evil, and yet in this thread we have developers who have deliberately filled players' time with non-gameplay in order to make money, and players steadfastly defend it. I wonder if there's a psychological term for people who defend their conmen.
"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 VengeSunsoar Games are for entertainment. If they are not entertaining you they are not fulfilling their purpose.
Delayed fun in a game is never ever good design. Ever.
The dev has to know the audience they are targeting. The fun in that have is targeted to that audience. Putting in activities that delay the fun for your targeted audience is bad design.
So the devs need to design the game for whoever their audience is. The rule still applies. Delayed fun in a game is bad design.
I get the impression you think "delayed fun" is bad game design.
I sure hope I don't play any games that delay my fun. It almost sounds as bad as cheap thrills.
No gameplay benefit exclusively requires slow travel. So the design simply doesn't justify itself.
Your wrong.
How can you have local economies without it? What's the point in having mounts/vehicles/transportation/movement enhancing spells if you can just teleport everywhere? How about a sense of distance or time relating to the size of the world? How about just the very act of walking from town to town with the possibility of emergent game play because other people have to use the roads and anything could happen from bandit ambushes to combining caravans for saftey?
The closer one gets to instant travel the closer one gets to nullifying anything travel related.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Comments
Unless you feel that instances cut you off from the world and its players, and that the price of not being able to kill a certain boss sometimes due to competition is worth it in order to keep the game an actual world and not a multiplayer lobby. I think you need to realize that what you are looking for in an MMORPG is not what everyone is looking for.
Your logic is sound from your perspective. It is not sound from my perspective.
Well you're certainly free to attempt to make a game which deliberately dilutes its own content behind giant non-gameplay timesinks like travel, and see how that turns out for you. The reality is that if everyone generally enjoys A, B, and C, you are not going to make a better game by removing B and C and creating a 5-hour wait to reach activity A.
It's not a 'weasel word' to use the term overwhelmingly. There is a type of fun found in Farmville and a type of fun from watching movies, and these types of entertainment are part of games at times. But the #1 star of the show is pattern mastery. It wasn't a quote. It was a summary of A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. Read it. (Koster was lead designer of UO.)
Look it's not cynical to call it delayed gratification. Games are about gratification, and providing the most enjoyable parts immediately is how you avoid deliberately wasting players' time. Anything else is delayed gratification -- intentionally hiding the fun behind arbitrary timesinks.
The ironic part is these arbitrary timesinks were deliberately created to sell subscriptions for more months. And here I am a designer telling you it's bad game design and you're the player saying you want more of that, when literally the only reason it showed up in these games was to milk more money from the subscription model.
Saying that travel is boring non-gameplay in nearly every game isn't 'weasel words'. It's the simple truth. Players enjoy gameplay, and gameplay is decisions, and travel in most games is nearly devoid of decisions (and the few there are, are very repetitive.) Although I may have to think on this to remind myself which games actually have enjoyable travel. FTL was one that I was thinking of, but now I realize it's really just teleporting immediately between events and shops and combat (between all the interesting decisions the game offers, basically) and no actual travel is experienced. So even though the entire game is ostensibly about travel, it's actually not about travel at all.
As for wiki-checking, games exist in our world. Our world has wikis. So any feature which rewards wiki-checking is a feature where the designer is essentially saying "...and at this point in gameplay, I want players to alt-tab to check for a map coordinate." Which is generally a very stupid design decision which shouldn't be made. Sure a handful of players may deliberately (or through incompetence) choose to solve things the slow and inaccurate way, but we can't design the game purely for those players. I mean there's always going to be a problem for players to solve, but it's up to the game whether that problem strongly rewards alt-tabbing or simply rewards good solid play.
As for the last bit, explaining how waiting can be its own reward doesn't magically solve the problem. The reality is this:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The key is that Player B will always enjoy the game somewhat. He'll be presented with teleport vs. slow travel, and by choosing slow travel it means his enjoyment of that immersion outweighs the disadvantages. He gets some enjoyment still.
Whereas if Player A is forced to slow-travel, he gets no enjoyment at all.
A lot of things like localized economies can also be had without forcing players to do the lugging around. If I can give my NPC servant orders to move things from City A to City B, then that frees me up to engage in the decision-heavy portions of the game rather than manually traveling places. I actually think more games should do this, as localized economies in certain forms can be a lot of fun -- but never if the player is required to manually cart things themself. Obviously the speed and capacity of NPCs would be tightly controlled in a way that achieved the right feel of the localized economy, including the fact that only NPCs would be capable of moving these things around.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Fun is subjective. I don't really enjoy gaining new items much when playing games anymore. Generally the new items don't matter because the game is to easy already. There is no need to get items which boost your stats or give you more damage. You could probably complete most of these games solo content with nothing but starter gear. I wonder if anyone has actually tried this before.
Traveling is a lot of fun to me. I can tell you why that is. Part of it is because there is an element of not knowing what to expect. Something dangerous might pop out and attack you. Something you might not be able to handle.
Large forests, deserts, plains, etc. are exciting to encounter when you don't know they are there. Remove your GPS and just go off in search of something and see what happens. Probe different areas and see what you can accomplish. I believe exploration has always been part of homo sapiens life. They have traveled from Africa to different continents. In America the settlers traveled from east to west of the continent. It was an Unknown and Dangerous place. People still wanted to travel because it was exciting to see the unknown and there was hope of a better life. You could say it's in most humans blood to want to explore new places.
Generally RPGs are based on adventures. I don't see how you can have an adventure if you are instantly moved to each dungeon or instantly moved to a separated PvP area. Adventure requires that you explore the unknown and face many hardships on you journey. You might get lost, get ambushed, run into some fog/weather condition, encounter dangerous creatures in the night, find something unexpected, etc.
The question I have is are people really having fun in these games. To me it's impossible to have fun when you can't really fail. If the only parts of the game that are important are the segregated PvE group/raid and the PvP esport then why bother with the single player outside world portion of the game at all? To me none of those activities are fun. Either they are about endlessly killing other player over and over again without any real purpose or grinding for loot upgrades over and over again. This defeats the purpose of the game IMO. The purpose being to go on an adventure.
[quote]
A lot of things like localized economies can also be had without forcing players to do the lugging around. If I can give my NPC servant orders to move things from City A to City B, then that frees me up to engage in the decision-heavy portions of the game rather than manually traveling places. I
[/quote]
A provide that convenience at a cost as well. Instead of being a slave you pay them. Don't want to possibly lose a portion of your wares to bandits? Have to pay security too. Don't want to pay anyone? Then hoof it.
Like others have said, there is no right or wrong way. Its preference. Everyone has different goals in life and in games.
However, if you cannot even understand how another can enjoy something that takes time, thats a symptom of a bigger problem.
"Good things come to those who wait."
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
"The salt of patience seasons everything."
"You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction."
"Nothing worthwhile comes easily"
It feels better to buy something with money you worked for than money you were given. Food tastes better after a hard day's work. These are things people know if they've lived life. Its one thing to want to spend your leisure time doing something shallow and fun, but if you cannot understand these principles and why they're desirable in a game, its because you've probably spent your life having things given to you rather than earning them yourself.
Wouldn't this be just as subjective as goals in MMOs?
For instance a lot of people work a desk job in this day and age. Many probably go to work and collect a pay check. They use this to buy items. Weather you actually earned that meal is very subjective. I go to work and collect a pay check. I work hard when it's needed, but I can't say I feel like I deserve anything in life because of doing that.
On the flip side if you lived outside, went hunting, grew your own vegetables, built your own well, made your own house, and built your own tools you could say that you earned everything you have. How many people actually do that though? We are talking about a society where people consume massive amounts of entertainment.
The problem is any benefit to travel can be achieved other ways:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Outside perception is irrelevant. Work, time and patience are constants. Maybe one man's desk job is as arduous as another man's life as a frontiersman.
This is where you err. For the sake of telling a story, it may be good to skip the monotonous details. To live a story, you experience everything in between.
Thats the difference in you and the people you're arguing with. You want Mordor to come to you, while we want to experience everything in between.
I would say that as long as it makes you happy. To me all achievements in life are fairly hollow. People just like to think they are achieving something to make themselves feel better. It's not much different then developers setting goals for you in a game. You do feel better when you can stand on your own two feet, but weather or not you are standing on your own two feet is generally determined by what society perceives as standing on your own two feet. You are generally always at the mercy of society and what it believes is wright and wrong.
This made me laugh.
Great analogy .. but i think you miss the point.
It is more like Chinese buffet restaurant starts to serve pizzas, and that is why I show up. And I don't see a problem, if Chinese buffet serves pizzas, to talk about how great pizzas are.
(BTW, may be we should switch the example to a pizza place serving japanese ramen .. since i don't like pizza that much)
You cannot beat the final WOW boss of the final raid on Mythic difficulty without a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of skill. So none of the quotes above fail to be true of WOW.
Except the shortcut one (which is the worst quote, because any place worth going is worth creating shortcuts to; it's why we have roads, you know.)
Stating that everyone has different goals is great. It's literally the strongest case for my point!
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
... I know somewhere inside you that you think this is what you want, but does this create a sense of world ? I am fine with having a living world that changes, but have static places within that world anchor it to some sort of reality. Content doesn't have to be fresh everyday to be rewarding.
You're still not getting it (spoiler: you never will).
Thats great that a WoW boss is difficult. I'm sure many of us would find that fun. The problem to us is that the rest of the game lacks that same difficulty and sense of accomplishment. When we leave the dungeon we don't want to go back into a menu and queue up for something else. We want to fight our way back to the city to repair our armor and buy our rations.
If he cares about efficiencies that much, may be he should port. And I don't see why other people who like to port need to meet player B just to make him happy. And if there are enough who really like "immersion" enough, player B will have people to meet.
There is no real solution. Game design is driven by supply & demand. If a dev wants to target an audience who like fast travel, you just have to either ignore the efficiency issue, or play another game.
BTW, I thought people like slow leveling here .. i.e. low efficiencies. Isn't that the perfect combo? Slow travel *and* slow leveling by choice. What is the complaint again? If you want to race others to level, may be immersion & slow travel is not for you.
So you like part of the game, and not another part.
Isn't the solution simple? Skip the part you do not like, and play the part you do.
If most of the audience don't want to bother to fight back to the city, blizz is not going to put that in. So either you have to live with it, or play other games.
Delayed fun in a game is never ever good design. Ever.
The dev has to know the audience they are targeting. The fun in that have is targeted to that audience. Putting in activities that delay the fun for your targeted audience is bad design.
So the devs need to design the game for whoever their audience is. The rule still applies. Delayed fun in a game is bad design.
First off, I do not recall ANY MMORPG *I* played that had me "waiting around for an hour" with nothing to do. Even during that oh-so-dreaded "downtime" when the group is recovering from a fight, or waiting for our turn to get into a group we chatted... TALKED to each other. I swear, some players... If the game is not forcing you to constantly click buttons, you are bored.
Second, Those "boring" empty non-play areas, things can and do happen. Talk about not seeing the forest through the trees. Other players inhabit these boring, non-action areas. This is where community comes in.
Next in line: Instant Gratification is a slippery slope, just like getting high from drugs. Soon, the player can not be "gratified" fast enough. What works is variety. A little instant here, a little delayed there. That way, we do not get "taught" a pattern to expect.
Travel: For YOU (and many others it seems), travel is not fun. Gratz. You have the games you desire. For those who actually enjoy the journey and not "just the end", too bad, so sad. Again, why play MMOs? MOBAs are more to your idea of fun. No "boring travel" involved there. In one aspect, *players* make the journey boring or interesting. You have no desire to make it fun, so it is not. Others try to make it fun and succeed more often then not. I totally understand why you find it boring. Do not try to belittle those who do find fun in travel.
The rest, you keep on proving that "fun" is VERY subjective. And "fun gameplay" is defined by each individual player, or do you pretend to *know* what everyone wants here, too? Majority of MMO players today? Yea, you speak for the majority. NOT everyone. Stop trying to act like you do.
If you want to argue business sense and I have no rebuttal. It would be stupid to not try to please the biggest crowd, if making money is your bottom line. I just wander what would happen if indeed, some company decided to be different. How successful would that MMORPG be? We may never know, thanks to players just like you who do NOT want worlds in which to adventure, but rather lobby based action combat games where you get to mash buttons/keys the whole time while logged in.
Thanks for ruining the genre.
- 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
In WOW I do not proceed from the character creation screen to the final Mythic raid boss at the very end. So no, Mordor doesn't come to me. I work my way through all the meaningful, eventful experiences between the start and the end.
Just like any good entertainment, it doesn't deliberately waste my time. And I still have a fantastic story to live through -- certainly much better than the diluted one that someone manually traveling will experience.
And remember it can't be stated enough that systems like these were deliberately implemented to keep players subscribing longer. In other threads, players are concerned about selling cosmetic items being evil, and yet in this thread we have developers who have deliberately filled players' time with non-gameplay in order to make money, and players steadfastly defend it. I wonder if there's a psychological term for people who defend their conmen.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I get the impression you think "delayed fun" is bad game design.
I sure hope I don't play any games that delay my fun. It almost sounds as bad as cheap thrills.
Your wrong.
How can you have local economies without it? What's the point in having mounts/vehicles/transportation/movement enhancing spells if you can just teleport everywhere? How about a sense of distance or time relating to the size of the world? How about just the very act of walking from town to town with the possibility of emergent game play because other people have to use the roads and anything could happen from bandit ambushes to combining caravans for saftey?
The closer one gets to instant travel the closer one gets to nullifying anything travel related.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
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