I think it's something that was thought out many years ago but has not been expanded upon and enhanced. I also believe that there is way too much focus on "End Game" to the detriment of "The Game" There is a reason why players think 95% of a MMORPG is a waste of time and that is a hole you guys have dug for yourselves.
The game is the game. Just because the mile-markers stopped when you reached the national park with the forest trail, that doesn't mean the journey ended. It means there are no more mile-markers, but the mile-markers weren't the journey. The journey was the journey.
It's always so strange when players give lip-service to caring about "the game", and then immediately imply they only care about levels (by implying endgame isn't game), which implies they don't actually care about the game.
MMORPG players don't think that 95% of a MMORPG is a waste of time. If they did they wouldn't play. They may call it a waste of time. They may buy into the idea that any activity which isn't working themselves to death in pursuit of money is a "waste of time". But if they choose to play the game, then they expect that the value of playing the game is worth the time it costs them.
"You guys"? I work in the games industry, but not on MMORPGs.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Who is this "we" you speak for? I definitely want RNGs back in my RPGs. I want to be somebody else, not a digital version of myself. And you make it sound like tabletop RPGs are a bad thing.
Why are die rolls not necessary in video games? What replaces them? If you say player skill, there is nothing to talk about. LARPs used player skill and a lot of imagination instead of die rolls. I have yet to meet someone who does whatever they are trying to do successfully 100% of the time, as MMOs accomplish now. Have you? We are not robots. We are human. Hell, hitting the right key is a hit or miss thing for me, let alone a weapon.
As for player input, yes, we had to face kind of in the right direction. No running away swinging your sword allowed. Makes sense, really. However, I could be looking up at the sky, left, or right and still get a hit, if the RNG was right.
The beauty of RPGs (for me) is building your character. Building their skillset instead of my own. In my opinion, that is pure FPS and has no business in an RPG, where not every attack or defense is the same. But I am in the minority and players will call whatever fits their bill however they want.
In real life, outcomes are deterministic. Your success or failure is not random.
Are you 100% successful in real life? No? Well then it sounds like failure happens even in deterministic systems.
And that's why die rolls aren't necessary. You're not a robot. You're human. You make mistakes, and those mistakes result in failure. Failure without a die roll causing it.
But of course RNG still exists in nearly all MMORPGs, so even if the above wasn't true (and it is true) there still wouldn't actually be a real concern. It's just RNG tends not to take the least fun form of "you pressed a button to do Skill A? Well sorry that just randomly didn't happen successfully. You missed."
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Used to be there were lots of common jelly beans in a bag, but only a few black licorice ones. Those were highly prized and worth waiting for.
This week I came across a different type of candy bag. Licorice beans for all! No waiting! And no need to root around for one. Just face roll as many as you like.
I suppose there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It's just for fun after all.
But it still seems a lot more fun to me if outcome and success are not guaranteed, where there is anticipation and doubt, and where gratification must often be delayed. In games as well as in candy.
Someone sold you on Rarez being really, really important in your early MMO exposure.
It's only the very easiest developer carrot at the end of the stick.
"I am unique and real and important," screams the one player out of the teeming mass.
Two thousand echoes answer, "Me Too!"
(I thought black licorice were the only beans you always found glued to the theater floor.)
In real life, outcomes are deterministic. Your success or failure is not random.
Are you 100% successful in real life? No? Well then it sounds like failure happens even in deterministic systems.
And that's why die rolls aren't necessary. You're not a robot. You're human. You make mistakes, and those mistakes result in failure. Failure without a die roll causing it.
But of course RNG still exists in nearly all MMORPGs, so even if the above wasn't true (and it is true) there still wouldn't actually be a real concern. It's just RNG tends not to take the least fun form of "you pressed a button to do Skill A? Well sorry that just randomly didn't happen successfully. You missed."
This is a yes and no thing again. Even if you call real life deterministic, the reality is that there are a lot of things in life that are very far removed from your control and can impact you directly. You generally don't control the cost of things, how people will react to you, the actions of others that impact you, the due dates of work projects, or necessarily how or when you die. There is so much that is functionally unknown to you and up to chance on a daily basis that you either don't actively account for or try to account for and constantly are load-balancing in an obsessive-compulsive manner.
That's the RNG of life.
As it pertains to gameplay, RNG as a component of character stats is the set example of your character's level of proficiency. Pressing a button is infinitely easier than actually using a weapon or otherwise, so most games utilize character chance as a representation of their skill with the chosen abilities, which is stacked with the historical aspect that it was a way to introduce variance to a player experience so that the outcome of every event isn't completely predictable.
It's that point for the most part why it still stays. The unpredictability is necessary to give interest to a mechanic that is otherwise kind of flat and predictable. If an ability always hits for the same amount of damage then you are simply doing a flat comparison of numbers and the bigger number wins. Randomize those numbers a bit and suddenly you have a range of enemies that can still pose a challenge and tougher enemies that you might actually have a chance against.
People aren't as scared of RNG as you seem to claim they are. It's a gambling mechanic and lots of players are perfectly happy to gamble a character's hp, and money, away on the potential success of RNG.
EDIT: If we wanted to take this point seriously...
"You're human. You make mistakes, and those mistakes result in failure. Failure without a die roll causing it."
Then you're already extending your logic to say that a purely skill based system is better than any alternative.
Before anything else is said, you can already tell this isn't true, as there is such a wide myriad of games that still utilize stats and effects to give randomization to a player's actions. As said prior, it's still a staple of even ARPG games like Diablo 3 even where one would assume player actions are the core of most every activity.
So, taking that what you said isn't actually true, it's also not really supported by the present reality of RPGs, MMORPGs, ARPGs, etc.
"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
I think it's something that was thought out many years ago but has not been expanded upon and enhanced. I also believe that there is way too much focus on "End Game" to the detriment of "The Game" There is a reason why players think 95% of a MMORPG is a waste of time and that is a hole you guys have dug for yourselves.
The game is the game. Just because the mile-markers stopped when you reached the national park with the forest trail, that doesn't mean the journey ended. It means there are no more mile-markers, but the mile-markers weren't the journey. The journey was the journey.
It's always so strange when players give lip-service to caring about "the game", and then immediately imply they only care about levels (by implying endgame isn't game), which implies they don't actually care about the game.
MMORPG players don't think that 95% of a MMORPG is a waste of time. If they did they wouldn't play. They may call it a waste of time. They may buy into the idea that any activity which isn't working themselves to death in pursuit of money is a "waste of time". But if they choose to play the game, then they expect that the value of playing the game is worth the time it costs them.
"You guys"? I work in the games industry, but not on MMORPGs.
the reason leveling happens so quickly is because many thought it to be a waste of time and just wanted to reach end game. The amount of time spent developing a character isn't really the issue for me though, it was the amount of time spent in any given area. A vast majority of modern mmos have a player blast though zone after zone never to return. This causes people who care about the journey to get frustrated and demand that leveling is too fast.
And that's why die rolls aren't necessary. You're not a robot. You're human. You make mistakes, and those mistakes result in failure. Failure without a die roll causing it.
But what sort of mechanic would you use to replace say the RNG for a critical hit?
I'll use boxing as an example. A fair few boxers win fights through knockout (critical hit) but it's completely luck based whether they land that crit.
More often than not throughout the fight they land blows to the head and fail at the crit, even land blows in places that would crit.
Luck plays a big role in a lot of sports so how do you replicate that luck in video games without RNG?
I think it's something that was thought out many years ago but has not been expanded upon and enhanced. I also believe that there is way too much focus on "End Game" to the detriment of "The Game" There is a reason why players think 95% of a MMORPG is a waste of time and that is a hole you guys have dug for yourselves.
The game is the game. Just because the mile-markers stopped when you reached the national park with the forest trail, that doesn't mean the journey ended. It means there are no more mile-markers, but the mile-markers weren't the journey. The journey was the journey.
It's always so strange when players give lip-service to caring about "the game", and then immediately imply they only care about levels (by implying endgame isn't game), which implies they don't actually care about the game.
MMORPG players don't think that 95% of a MMORPG is a waste of time. If they did they wouldn't play. They may call it a waste of time. They may buy into the idea that any activity which isn't working themselves to death in pursuit of money is a "waste of time". But if they choose to play the game, then they expect that the value of playing the game is worth the time it costs them.
"You guys"? I work in the games industry, but not on MMORPGs.
"You guys" is nothing directed at you personally Axehilt my apologies.
Someway, Somehow, MMORPG's have become a genre where the Mentality is to Rush. Rush to a place where the content is extremely limited.
They seem to have come to a place where the longevity of the product is pretty much on par with its single player counterpart.
I don't believe this is what was intended with the genre. But this is where the genre seems to have ended up.
You seem to have a lot of interest in the genre. What would you do to keep a player invested for the long term in your game?
You seem to have a lot of interest in the genre. What would you do to keep a player invested for the long term in your game?
Isn't that only necessary with low churn?
Consider: a) invest gazillions of dollars trying to keep capped players entertained forever (impossible?), or b) just replace them with new players nearly instantaneously whenever they (inevitably?) leave.
The earliest mmo's believed in longevity, because they were born out of games (MUDs) that really believed in it. But it may not actually be the best answer in a "Massively multiplayer" situation.
Websites can strive to keep users from surfing away as long as possible, or they can play the same game with click bait and enormous churn.
You seem to have a lot of interest in the genre. What would you do to keep a player invested for the long term in your game?
Isn't that only necessary with low churn?
Consider: a) invest gazillions of dollars trying to keep capped players entertained forever (impossible?), or b) just replace them with new players nearly instantaneously whenever they (inevitably?) leave.
The earliest mmo's believed in longevity, because they were born out of games (MUDs) that really believed in it. But it may not actually be the best answer in a "Massively multiplayer" situation.
Websites can strive to keep users from surfing away as long as possible, or they can play the same game with click bait and enormous churn.
Valid considerations and points. IMHO it's the reality of the business side of things in the current climate. But that's not my question.
I'll rephrase the question: If your "goal" is to keep a player invested in your MMORPG for the long term. What would you do to help achieve that goal?
Other than that, the hardware utilized for supporting servers and the network code needs to be given a lot more focus. A lot of studios I've worked with lack in that department and it is a major thing that will immediately define just how complex and deep a game you can design as the server and network is the backbone of how people interact with these games. To rely on older server stacks and network solutions that can not scale or handle the array of problems emergent game designs face will cripple you right off the bat.
And the number one reason for a better server ant networking layer, better use of AI. This doesn't specifically mean "make mobs smarter" it mainly means "give the game a brain". By making a system that can real-time track the actions of players you can then have the game itself pull from a library of content and procedurally generate both minor events to populate a player's activity list as well as tailor quest and special events around the players.
Along with server AI, an evolution of mob AI wouldn't be a bad idea. This isn't saying "make them smarter" again, what it'd be doing is giving each mob the potential to express a unique behavioral effect, such as more violent/rambunctious, more cowardly, etc. It's not something that should dramatically change the way the mob does things, but something that can catch a player occasionally and change their tempo.
Change how monster spawns work. This one isn't actually all that complicated. You still will plant a ton of spots across the world where things can spawn from, but no mobs simply auto-spawn ans sit around forever. Instead the spawners are tied into that AI mentioned above, and the game will thematically seed enemies and quest objectives into the world from those spawn locations.
Make questing "dynamic" and narrative "retroactive". This again relates to the AI and what I just mentioned about spawners. You can remove quest hubs pretty much outright, yet retain that constant trickle of minor events and rewards by making the game instead chain together and plant minor events for a player as they roam an area. It can be contextual to the zone by pulling from a specific library of potential options, and then drops them in for players to decide to interact with or not. The big quests end up having a similar feature, where the overarching plot may have an overarching specific goal, but the means to get there can pull from it's own small library of events that it can seed into the world and sequence randomly so that it adds more variance to a user's experience while keeping things constantly rolling. Retroactive narrative comes out of this method by recording what the players do and basically turning it into their character's epitaph or journal. While the achievements of two players may actually be pretty much identical when you break down what they have and have not done in the game, the manner in which they experienced things can vary widely, leading to a much more unique player experience while still resting on a reliable core.
Less vertical progression, more horizontal progression. Part of the problem and why players see the need to rush to endgame is because the verticality in the way a character's progress. The ultimate end in most offered scenarios is to be max level and "fully geared". It's not exceptionally personal and it's not exceptionally varied because ultimately you have a finite set of gear all players intend on using and rather finite class design and functions. Preferentially, making the vertical progression of players scale a lot less, and focus instead on the idea of using your levels to obtain perks that re-balance your stats along with gear that will add unique traits and further balance changes.
And as a personal curiosity, I'd love to tinker with an MMO where the character's are actually driven by their own personalities, and the player actually adopts a more loose role of guiding, advising, and commanding their avatars as an external force. Kind of like if you played Navi instead of Link, but Navi had abilities to actually do things other than chatter. Issuing commands to the avatar, buffing/tweaking them, using supporting abilities in combat, etc. Just feels like it'd be an interesting little thing to play in a slightly more casual context.
"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 reason leveling happens so quickly is because many thought it to be a waste of time and just wanted to reach end game. The amount of time spent developing a character isn't really the issue for me though, it was the amount of time spent in any given area. A vast majority of modern mmos have a player blast though zone after zone never to return. This causes people who care about the journey to get frustrated and demand that leveling is too fast.
Leveling is fast because of the grouping focus at endgame. If you created a gigantic, slow leveling process where grouping was required to advance at endgame, there wouldn't be enough players at endgame to group with. (And if the game involves heavy grouping while leveling, that still fragments the playerbase in the same way because the players at any given point of progression will be sparse, making grouping harder.)
It's not really a problem to blast through zones without returning.
If anything it's players who should be arguing for consumed zones. Developers would be more than willing to hire fewer level designers and re-hash old zones with new content.
The problem is summed up simply: Where do you want to spend your time?
An old zone you've explored,
Or a new zone which has mystery?
So while players say they want to re-hash the same zones repetitively, I'm pretty sure that's not what they actually want. I barely even fit the "explorer" archetype at all, and yet the latter (new zone) option sounds vastly more appealing to me.
I do think that there are some fun things that can be done in old zones (progression of the story elements you experienced the first time there), but generally speaking the trend of mostly-new-zones is a pretty smart direction.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
the reason leveling happens so quickly is because many thought it to be a waste of time and just wanted to reach end game. The amount of time spent developing a character isn't really the issue for me though, it was the amount of time spent in any given area. A vast majority of modern mmos have a player blast though zone after zone never to return. This causes people who care about the journey to get frustrated and demand that leveling is too fast.
Leveling is fast because of the grouping focus at endgame. If you created a gigantic, slow leveling process where grouping was required to advance at endgame, there wouldn't be enough players at endgame to group with. (And if the game involves heavy grouping while leveling, that still fragments the playerbase in the same way because the players at any given point of progression will be sparse, making grouping harder.)
It's not really a problem to blast through zones without returning.
If anything it's players who should be arguing for consumed zones. Developers would be more than willing to hire fewer level designers and re-hash old zones with new content.
The problem is summed up simply: Where do you want to spend your time?
An old zone you've explored,
Or a new zone which has mystery?
So while players say they want to re-hash the same zones repetitively, I'm pretty sure that's not what they actually want. I barely even fit the "explorer" archetype at all, and yet the latter (new zone) option sounds vastly more appealing to me.
I do think that there are some fun things that can be done in old zones (progression of the story elements you experienced the first time there), but generally speaking the trend of mostly-new-zones is a pretty smart direction.
My problem is that there isn't any exploring old zones. Rift for example, within 15 minutes I was in my 3rd or 4th zone and never saw the others again. Prefer open worlds where paths always cross there is something deeply interesting to do the entire time. Just my opinion.
My problem is that there isn't any exploring old zones. Rift for example, within 15 minutes I was in my 3rd or 4th zone and never saw the others again. Prefer open worlds where paths always cross there is something deeply interesting to do the entire time. Just my opinion.
that sounds not only terrible but also a huge waste of assets on part of the developer.
i havent played the game so there is that...
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
"You guys" is nothing directed at you personally Axehilt my apologies.
Someway, Somehow, MMORPG's have become a genre where the Mentality is to Rush. Rush to a place where the content is extremely limited.
They seem to have come to a place where the longevity of the product is pretty much on par with its single player counterpart.
I don't believe this is what was intended with the genre. But this is where the genre seems to have ended up.
You seem to have a lot of interest in the genre. What would you do to keep a player invested for the long term in your game?
Personally I feel the mentality to improve oneself rapidly has always been there. It's just that early MMORPGs had this slow-motion grind where if the fastest rate of leveling is 1 level every 20 hours, you're not going to think it's a rush. But players were still out there rushing to earn XP as quickly as possible. I know I was.
Developers actually are optimizing for longevity, but it's a different type of longevity than what you're describing. Developers want player retention. Player retention can be thought of as true longevity, since it's a measure of when each player drops off. It's beneficial to get as many players playing for as long as possible.
If players were blindly loyal, then a designer could simply multiply XP requirements by 100,000 and that would increase longevity.
Players are not blindly loyal. If the game is bad, they leave. So while there would probably be a handful of players who played dramatically longer in the "100,000x" game (compared with a typical MMORPG), the majority would play dramatically shorter, and so the actual longevity of the game would be much worse.
I feel like WOW is one of the better answers to your final question, as it balances a lot of important factors in how it shapes its content delivery.
Reaching the group-focused part of the game doesn't take as long as some other games, in order to maintain a large population of players in that part of the game.
As new content is added to the end of endgame, they make it easier to reach the tier before that tier.
As new content is added with expansions, they have often made it faster to get through earlier content. Not just to help with the above points, but also to rush players through the lower-quality old content towards the higher-quality new content.
Leveling content isn't overly grindy, and provides plenty of story, resulting in good retention.
They've done one pass improving their earliest (lvl 1-10) leveling experience, but honestly I think they'd see good results if they worked on that again. Or maybe the new installs they get are such a small trickle nowadays that this isn't worth it. (Because by this point the number of people who might be interested in WOW who haven't tried it yet is super small.)
They avoid re-using zones because players enjoy exploration.
The hardest endgame content takes a lot of time and effort to do successfully. Very few players achieve best-in-slot-everything (reaching the actual end of WOW) or even kill every boss on the hardest difficulty.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
But what sort of mechanic would you use to replace say the RNG for a critical hit?
I'll use boxing as an example. A fair few boxers win fights through knockout (critical hit) but it's completely luck based whether they land that crit.
More often than not throughout the fight they land blows to the head and fail at the crit, even land blows in places that would crit.
Luck plays a big role in a lot of sports so how do you replicate that luck in video games without RNG?
That's not luck though. It's deterministic.
Landing that blow with exactly that force in exactly that location to an opponent in exactly that physical state will always result in a knockout. That's the only result that would ever occur in that precise situation. It wasn't randomness that caused him to be knocked out. I don't know the exact factors which cause the brain to lose consciousness in that situation, but just because I don't know those factors doesn't mean they don't exist.
A better example is a coin-flip because it has fewer factors (it's mostly just physics.) This article is about an experiment which created a coin-flipping machine which flips things precisely the same way each time. Coin-flipping isn't random, the main factor is we aren't flipping a coin in precisely the same way each time (plus several other minor factors like wind and the imperfections of the coin.)
And that lends itself to our conversation, as the near-impossibility of training yourself to flip a coin in EXACTLY the same way each time is a perfect example of how games can work.
This also means it's already happening in MMORPGs, as I for one definitely don't perform my rotations with flawless perfection each time. This results in a lot of natural variation in my effectiveness, and would exist even if no RNG elements existed (though most of the RNG elements are fairly controlled, scheduled to happen x times per minute.)
(And arguably even those RNG elements aren't random, as if you knew the code for the random number generator and had all the factors that it used to generate a "random" number, you'd find that it's not actually random.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"You guys" is nothing directed at you personally Axehilt my apologies.
Someway, Somehow, MMORPG's have become a genre where the Mentality is to Rush. Rush to a place where the content is extremely limited.
They seem to have come to a place where the longevity of the product is pretty much on par with its single player counterpart.
I don't believe this is what was intended with the genre. But this is where the genre seems to have ended up.
You seem to have a lot of interest in the genre. What would you do to keep a player invested for the long term in your game?
Personally I feel the mentality to improve oneself rapidly has always been there. It's just that early MMORPGs had this slow-motion grind where if the fastest rate of leveling is 1 level every 20 hours, you're not going to think it's a rush. But players were still out there rushing to earn XP as quickly as possible. I know I was.
Developers actually are optimizing for longevity, but it's a different type of longevity than what you're describing. Developers want player retention. Player retention can be thought of as true longevity, since it's a measure of when each player drops off. It's beneficial to get as many players playing for as long as possible.
If players were blindly loyal, then a designer could simply multiply XP requirements by 100,000 and that would increase longevity.
Players are not blindly loyal. If the game is bad, they leave. So while there would probably be a handful of players who played dramatically longer in the "100,000x" game (compared with a typical MMORPG), the majority would play dramatically shorter, and so the actual longevity of the game would be much worse.
I feel like WOW is one of the better answers to your final question, as it balances a lot of important factors in how it shapes its content delivery.
Reaching the group-focused part of the game doesn't take as long as some other games, in order to maintain a large population of players in that part of the game.
As new content is added to the end of endgame, they make it easier to reach the tier before that tier.
As new content is added with expansions, they have often made it faster to get through earlier content. Not just to help with the above points, but also to rush players through the lower-quality old content towards the higher-quality new content.
Leveling content isn't overly grindy, and provides plenty of story, resulting in good retention.
They've done one pass improving their earliest (lvl 1-10) leveling experience, but honestly I think they'd see good results if they worked on that again. Or maybe the new installs they get are such a small trickle nowadays that this isn't worth it. (Because by this point the number of people who might be interested in WOW who haven't tried it yet is super small.)
They avoid re-using zones because players enjoy exploration.
The hardest endgame content takes a lot of time and effort to do successfully. Very few players achieve best-in-slot-everything (reaching the actual end of WOW) or even kill every boss on the hardest difficulty.
That's the problem with having levels with vast vertical progression in a themepark. Fast progression with focus on endgame just makes the design flaw more obvious.
That's the problem with having levels with vast vertical progression in a themepark. Fast progression with focus on endgame just makes the design flaw more obvious.
What's the problem with having levels? You allude to some "obvious" problem, and yet you haven't actually described a problem at all.
It's a strange way to respond to a post where I provided moderate detail to the rationale behind various design decisions WOW made. I've established the reason for a lot of WOW design decisions; if you want to establish an argument against them, you have to (a) form an argument, and (b) provide a certain amount of logic or evidence describing why the thing was flawed.
Because saying "WOW has obvious flaws" about a game which is literally one of the most successful games of all time leaves a lot to be desired, as posting goes.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That's the problem with having levels with vast vertical progression in a themepark. Fast progression with focus on endgame just makes the design flaw more obvious.
What's the problem with having levels? You allude to some "obvious" problem, and yet you haven't actually described a problem at all.
He said it right in the part you quoted.
"levels with vast vertical progression"
"Fast progression with focus on endgame"
It's fairly obvious what both those statements were pointing out. You illustrated the flaw for a lot of people in your own post by showing how most of the progression in the game was/is ultimately aimed at simply reaching another stage of grinding content. WoW is a pretty strong example in that regard of how severely flawed the design philosophy of some developers is, as the focus is placed constantly on such a narrow band of the game's content, not to mention raids aren't even that popular.
For example, if you look at WoW's in-game statistics on player completions the sum of them all only hits ~40%, and drops to less than 20% for the top grouping of raids. If you look at only the top tier it's presently .3%, as a lot of players simply don't enjoy it and wait until the next raid come out and difficulty shifts so that the content is easier.
It's poor design philosophy because you are focusing on a subset of players and their interests while neglecting the rest of the player base. That you have a bunch of players tolerating that life-cycle in no way renders it good game design.
This ends up compounding with other problems, like the aforementioned decay of value in levels in order to fuel continued vertical progression rather than, say, panning out the player's progression into new venues, classes, skill groups, etc. It's too linear and it's to finite, and the only way it keeps going is, in fact, in a large part due to blind loyalty. Similar reason as to why LoL is so silly-huge, it sits in a position where it has perpetuated itself for a long time on pretty much name and nostalgia.
"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
That's the problem with having levels with vast vertical progression in a themepark. Fast progression with focus on endgame just makes the design flaw more obvious.
What's the problem with having levels? You allude to some "obvious" problem, and yet you haven't actually described a problem at all.
He said it right in the part you quoted.
"levels with vast vertical progression"
"Fast progression with focus on endgame"
It's fairly obvious what both those statements were pointing out. You illustrated the flaw for a lot of people in your own post by showing how most of the progression in the game was/is ultimately aimed at simply reaching another stage of grinding content. WoW is a pretty strong example in that regard of how severely flawed the design philosophy of some developers is, as the focus is placed constantly on such a narrow band of the game's content, not to mention raids aren't even that popular.
For example, if you look at WoW's in-game statistics on player completions the sum of them all only hits ~40%, and drops to less than 20% for the top grouping of raids. If you look at only the top tier it's presently .3%, as a lot of players simply don't enjoy it and wait until the next raid come out and difficulty shifts so that the content is easier.
It's poor design philosophy because you are focusing on a subset of players and their interests while neglecting the rest of the player base. That you have a bunch of players tolerating that life-cycle in no way renders it good game design.
This ends up compounding with other problems, like the aforementioned decay of value in levels in order to fuel continued vertical progression rather than, say, panning out the player's progression into new venues, classes, skill groups, etc. It's too linear and it's to finite, and the only way it keeps going is, in fact, in a large part due to blind loyalty. Similar reason as to why LoL is so silly-huge, it sits in a position where it has perpetuated itself for a long time on pretty much name and nostalgia.
Great view point.
As I said vast vertical progression in a questhub themepark focused on end game simply makes content a speed bump. It's not hard to understand a design flaw when marginalize over 90% of your content to appease a small percentage of players doing end game content.
WOW for example has a very nice open world that is marginalized by levels, questhubs, fast progression, flying mounts and ques. Imagine WoW same content with no ques to warp people. No levels and forced quest progression to guide people. No quest hubs driving you in quest clusters. You would have a game essentially like Skyrim with pretty good content and classes.
As I said vast vertical progression in a questhub themepark focused on end game simply makes content a speed bump. It's not hard to understand a design flaw when marginalize over 90% of your content to appease a small percentage of players doing end game content.
WOW for example has a very nice open world that is marginalized by levels, questhubs, fast progression, flying mounts and ques. Imagine WoW same content with no ques to warp people. No levels and forced quest progression to guide people. No quest hubs driving you in quest clusters. You would have a game essentially like Skyrim with pretty good content and classes.
But we've already covered that the vast vertical progression doesn't matter, because everyone ends up in the same place. Progression is one of the pillars of RPGs though, so having it feel very noticeable in a game has a strong undeniable benefit.
We've also already covered that exploring new places is more appealing than repetitively revisiting old places. So content isn't "marginalized" just because you don't revisit it. Quite the opposite: content is more interesting because it's taking place someplace new, and would generally be less interesting if it took place in the same old place as before.
I don't have to imagine WOW with no teleports. I played MMORPGs like that, and early WOW involved only limited teleportation that required many players to walk someplace manually.
It sucked.
It was a complete waste of time, because it involved a lot of repetition and almost zero thinking/gameplay. Players don't play RPGs to watch a run animation. They play RPGs to do things. The reality is that early MMORPGs were implemented like that to trick players into subscribing longer -- all of the various ways they made their mechanics excessively time-consuming and repetitive were not for the player's benefit, but for their bank account's benefit. (It didn't work that well in the end of course, because you make way more money providing great gameplay than trying to sucker players with overly repetitive garbage, but that was their intent.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I agree, though this isn't the only problem with MMOs. Far from it. The entire industry is a disgrace at this point.
I have searched for a long time, but I simply cannot find a fantasy-themed MMO that I consider to be worth my time. You would think that in an industry as big as this there would be a game out there with quality (or at least serviceable) graphics, coherent controls, dynamic skill-based combat (or at least mostly skill-based), in an open-world, non-carebear, pvp-oriented environmet with no safe zones. Safe zones are where MMOs go to die. MMOs are about player interaction. If you don't want to interact with other players, then don't play an MMO. I'm not saying all MMOs have to be this way, but why is it so hard to find ONE good fantasy MMO that doesn't give a shit about carebears?
For the life of me, I can't find one. All of the big name MMOs follow the same old tired design, with a restricted class/level system, instanced and regulated environments, and combat that is far too based on magical gear and power-ups and other nonsense. This is the restricted carebear design philosophy followed by almost all the big names in MMOs, and the ones that don't follow this path are mostly indie titles with nowhere near the same budget.
It's really unfortunate that this is the path MMOs have taken. The mindless pursuit of profit has derailed all possibilities of the great, unique MMOs that could have been. In time the industry will surely recover from this, but in the meantime it's still extremely difficult for those of us who know what games are for, what MMOs are for.
My search for a great fantasy-themed hardcore non-carebear MMO continues...
As I said vast vertical progression in a questhub themepark focused on end game simply makes content a speed bump. It's not hard to understand a design flaw when marginalize over 90% of your content to appease a small percentage of players doing end game content.
WOW for example has a very nice open world that is marginalized by levels, questhubs, fast progression, flying mounts and ques. Imagine WoW same content with no ques to warp people. No levels and forced quest progression to guide people. No quest hubs driving you in quest clusters. You would have a game essentially like Skyrim with pretty good content and classes.
But we've already covered that the vast vertical progression doesn't matter, because everyone ends up in the same place. Progression is one of the pillars of RPGs though, so having it feel very noticeable in a game has a strong undeniable benefit.
We've also already covered that exploring new places is more appealing than repetitively revisiting old places. So content isn't "marginalized" just because you don't revisit it. Quite the opposite: content is more interesting because it's taking place someplace new, and would generally be less interesting if it took place in the same old place as before.
I don't have to imagine WOW with no teleports. I played MMORPGs like that, and early WOW involved only limited teleportation that required many players to walk someplace manually.
It sucked.
It was a complete waste of time, because it involved a lot of repetition and almost zero thinking/gameplay. Players don't play RPGs to watch a run animation. They play RPGs to do things. The reality is that early MMORPGs were implemented like that to trick players into subscribing longer -- all of the various ways they made their mechanics excessively time-consuming and repetitive were not for the player's benefit, but for their bank account's benefit. (It didn't work that well in the end of course, because you make way more money providing great gameplay than trying to sucker players with overly repetitive garbage, but that was their intent.)
You are proving my point. I am not talking about a marathon around town. THAT is precisely why the vast vertical level progression in themeparks is a problem. Western players do not want the grind of NPC killing or questing. Its why the focus was placed end game. Nobody wants to run the gauntlet but wants the door prize.
Leveling is one form of progression. Far from required. The content is marginalized because you don't revisit it all. Once you get to end game you just repeat end game content. That's not new content.
In a levelless system most of the content is available how and when you want to play. The whole world is essentially end game. You go places for a reason and not the yellow brick road told you to or you have no where else level appropriate. The game is about obtaining new abilities, gear, and honing player skill just like a leveled one. It also opens the game up to having areas based on challenge vs. areas based on 1-6 or 35-40 in level with the same flat challenge balanced to your level.
Axehilt said: It didn't work that well in the end of course, because you make way more money providing great gameplay than trying to sucker players with overly repetitive garbage, ...
...And yet your "best example" is an MMO where you endlessly raid and daily grind as the primary objective.
I sincerely hope you eventually discover the irony in this.
"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
Comments
It's always so strange when players give lip-service to caring about "the game", and then immediately imply they only care about levels (by implying endgame isn't game), which implies they don't actually care about the game.
MMORPG players don't think that 95% of a MMORPG is a waste of time. If they did they wouldn't play. They may call it a waste of time. They may buy into the idea that any activity which isn't working themselves to death in pursuit of money is a "waste of time". But if they choose to play the game, then they expect that the value of playing the game is worth the time it costs them.
"You guys"? I work in the games industry, but not on MMORPGs.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
In real life, outcomes are deterministic. Your success or failure is not random.
Are you 100% successful in real life? No? Well then it sounds like failure happens even in deterministic systems.
And that's why die rolls aren't necessary. You're not a robot. You're human. You make mistakes, and those mistakes result in failure. Failure without a die roll causing it.
But of course RNG still exists in nearly all MMORPGs, so even if the above wasn't true (and it is true) there still wouldn't actually be a real concern. It's just RNG tends not to take the least fun form of "you pressed a button to do Skill A? Well sorry that just randomly didn't happen successfully. You missed."
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It's only the very easiest developer carrot at the end of the stick.
"I am unique and real and important," screams the one player out of the teeming mass.
Two thousand echoes answer, "Me Too!"
(I thought black licorice were the only beans you always found glued to the theater floor.)
That's the RNG of life.
As it pertains to gameplay, RNG as a component of character stats is the set example of your character's level of proficiency. Pressing a button is infinitely easier than actually using a weapon or otherwise, so most games utilize character chance as a representation of their skill with the chosen abilities, which is stacked with the historical aspect that it was a way to introduce variance to a player experience so that the outcome of every event isn't completely predictable.
It's that point for the most part why it still stays. The unpredictability is necessary to give interest to a mechanic that is otherwise kind of flat and predictable. If an ability always hits for the same amount of damage then you are simply doing a flat comparison of numbers and the bigger number wins. Randomize those numbers a bit and suddenly you have a range of enemies that can still pose a challenge and tougher enemies that you might actually have a chance against.
People aren't as scared of RNG as you seem to claim they are. It's a gambling mechanic and lots of players are perfectly happy to gamble a character's hp, and money, away on the potential success of RNG.
EDIT: If we wanted to take this point seriously...
"You're human. You make mistakes, and those mistakes result in failure. Failure without a die roll causing it."
Then you're already extending your logic to say that a purely skill based system is better than any alternative.
Before anything else is said, you can already tell this isn't true, as there is such a wide myriad of games that still utilize stats and effects to give randomization to a player's actions. As said prior, it's still a staple of even ARPG games like Diablo 3 even where one would assume player actions are the core of most every activity.
So, taking that what you said isn't actually true, it's also not really supported by the present reality of RPGs, MMORPGs, ARPGs, etc.
"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
I'll use boxing as an example. A fair few boxers win fights through knockout (critical hit) but it's completely luck based whether they land that crit.
More often than not throughout the fight they land blows to the head and fail at the crit, even land blows in places that would crit.
Luck plays a big role in a lot of sports so how do you replicate that luck in video games without RNG?
Someway, Somehow, MMORPG's have become a genre where the Mentality is to Rush. Rush to a place where the content is extremely limited.
They seem to have come to a place where the longevity of the product is pretty much on par with its single player counterpart.
I don't believe this is what was intended with the genre. But this is where the genre seems to have ended up.
You seem to have a lot of interest in the genre. What would you do to keep a player invested for the long term in your game?
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
"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
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Consider:
a) invest gazillions of dollars trying to keep capped players entertained forever (impossible?), or
b) just replace them with new players nearly instantaneously whenever they (inevitably?) leave.
The earliest mmo's believed in longevity, because they were born out of games (MUDs) that really believed in it. But it may not actually be the best answer in a "Massively multiplayer" situation.
Websites can strive to keep users from surfing away as long as possible, or they can play the same game with click bait and enormous churn.
I'll rephrase the question: If your "goal" is to keep a player invested in your MMORPG for the long term. What would you do to help achieve that goal?
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Other than that, the hardware utilized for supporting servers and the network code needs to be given a lot more focus. A lot of studios I've worked with lack in that department and it is a major thing that will immediately define just how complex and deep a game you can design as the server and network is the backbone of how people interact with these games. To rely on older server stacks and network solutions that can not scale or handle the array of problems emergent game designs face will cripple you right off the bat.
And the number one reason for a better server ant networking layer, better use of AI. This doesn't specifically mean "make mobs smarter" it mainly means "give the game a brain". By making a system that can real-time track the actions of players you can then have the game itself pull from a library of content and procedurally generate both minor events to populate a player's activity list as well as tailor quest and special events around the players.
Along with server AI, an evolution of mob AI wouldn't be a bad idea. This isn't saying "make them smarter" again, what it'd be doing is giving each mob the potential to express a unique behavioral effect, such as more violent/rambunctious, more cowardly, etc. It's not something that should dramatically change the way the mob does things, but something that can catch a player occasionally and change their tempo.
Change how monster spawns work. This one isn't actually all that complicated. You still will plant a ton of spots across the world where things can spawn from, but no mobs simply auto-spawn ans sit around forever. Instead the spawners are tied into that AI mentioned above, and the game will thematically seed enemies and quest objectives into the world from those spawn locations.
Make questing "dynamic" and narrative "retroactive". This again relates to the AI and what I just mentioned about spawners. You can remove quest hubs pretty much outright, yet retain that constant trickle of minor events and rewards by making the game instead chain together and plant minor events for a player as they roam an area. It can be contextual to the zone by pulling from a specific library of potential options, and then drops them in for players to decide to interact with or not. The big quests end up having a similar feature, where the overarching plot may have an overarching specific goal, but the means to get there can pull from it's own small library of events that it can seed into the world and sequence randomly so that it adds more variance to a user's experience while keeping things constantly rolling. Retroactive narrative comes out of this method by recording what the players do and basically turning it into their character's epitaph or journal. While the achievements of two players may actually be pretty much identical when you break down what they have and have not done in the game, the manner in which they experienced things can vary widely, leading to a much more unique player experience while still resting on a reliable core.
Less vertical progression, more horizontal progression. Part of the problem and why players see the need to rush to endgame is because the verticality in the way a character's progress. The ultimate end in most offered scenarios is to be max level and "fully geared". It's not exceptionally personal and it's not exceptionally varied because ultimately you have a finite set of gear all players intend on using and rather finite class design and functions. Preferentially, making the vertical progression of players scale a lot less, and focus instead on the idea of using your levels to obtain perks that re-balance your stats along with gear that will add unique traits and further balance changes.
And as a personal curiosity, I'd love to tinker with an MMO where the character's are actually driven by their own personalities, and the player actually adopts a more loose role of guiding, advising, and commanding their avatars as an external force. Kind of like if you played Navi instead of Link, but Navi had abilities to actually do things other than chatter. Issuing commands to the avatar, buffing/tweaking them, using supporting abilities in combat, etc. Just feels like it'd be an interesting little thing to play in a slightly more casual context.
"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
It's not really a problem to blast through zones without returning.
If anything it's players who should be arguing for consumed zones. Developers would be more than willing to hire fewer level designers and re-hash old zones with new content.
The problem is summed up simply: Where do you want to spend your time?
- An old zone you've explored,
- Or a new zone which has mystery?
So while players say they want to re-hash the same zones repetitively, I'm pretty sure that's not what they actually want. I barely even fit the "explorer" archetype at all, and yet the latter (new zone) option sounds vastly more appealing to me.I do think that there are some fun things that can be done in old zones (progression of the story elements you experienced the first time there), but generally speaking the trend of mostly-new-zones is a pretty smart direction.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
i havent played the game so there is that...
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Personally I feel the mentality to improve oneself rapidly has always been there. It's just that early MMORPGs had this slow-motion grind where if the fastest rate of leveling is 1 level every 20 hours, you're not going to think it's a rush. But players were still out there rushing to earn XP as quickly as possible. I know I was.
Developers actually are optimizing for longevity, but it's a different type of longevity than what you're describing. Developers want player retention. Player retention can be thought of as true longevity, since it's a measure of when each player drops off. It's beneficial to get as many players playing for as long as possible.
If players were blindly loyal, then a designer could simply multiply XP requirements by 100,000 and that would increase longevity.
Players are not blindly loyal. If the game is bad, they leave. So while there would probably be a handful of players who played dramatically longer in the "100,000x" game (compared with a typical MMORPG), the majority would play dramatically shorter, and so the actual longevity of the game would be much worse.
I feel like WOW is one of the better answers to your final question, as it balances a lot of important factors in how it shapes its content delivery.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That's not luck though. It's deterministic.
Landing that blow with exactly that force in exactly that location to an opponent in exactly that physical state will always result in a knockout. That's the only result that would ever occur in that precise situation. It wasn't randomness that caused him to be knocked out. I don't know the exact factors which cause the brain to lose consciousness in that situation, but just because I don't know those factors doesn't mean they don't exist.
A better example is a coin-flip because it has fewer factors (it's mostly just physics.) This article is about an experiment which created a coin-flipping machine which flips things precisely the same way each time. Coin-flipping isn't random, the main factor is we aren't flipping a coin in precisely the same way each time (plus several other minor factors like wind and the imperfections of the coin.)
And that lends itself to our conversation, as the near-impossibility of training yourself to flip a coin in EXACTLY the same way each time is a perfect example of how games can work.
This also means it's already happening in MMORPGs, as I for one definitely don't perform my rotations with flawless perfection each time. This results in a lot of natural variation in my effectiveness, and would exist even if no RNG elements existed (though most of the RNG elements are fairly controlled, scheduled to happen x times per minute.)
(And arguably even those RNG elements aren't random, as if you knew the code for the random number generator and had all the factors that it used to generate a "random" number, you'd find that it's not actually random.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It's a strange way to respond to a post where I provided moderate detail to the rationale behind various design decisions WOW made. I've established the reason for a lot of WOW design decisions; if you want to establish an argument against them, you have to (a) form an argument, and (b) provide a certain amount of logic or evidence describing why the thing was flawed.
Because saying "WOW has obvious flaws" about a game which is literally one of the most successful games of all time leaves a lot to be desired, as posting goes.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"levels with vast vertical progression"
"Fast progression with focus on endgame"
It's fairly obvious what both those statements were pointing out. You illustrated the flaw for a lot of people in your own post by showing how most of the progression in the game was/is ultimately aimed at simply reaching another stage of grinding content. WoW is a pretty strong example in that regard of how severely flawed the design philosophy of some developers is, as the focus is placed constantly on such a narrow band of the game's content, not to mention raids aren't even that popular.
For example, if you look at WoW's in-game statistics on player completions the sum of them all only hits ~40%, and drops to less than 20% for the top grouping of raids. If you look at only the top tier it's presently .3%, as a lot of players simply don't enjoy it and wait until the next raid come out and difficulty shifts so that the content is easier.
It's poor design philosophy because you are focusing on a subset of players and their interests while neglecting the rest of the player base. That you have a bunch of players tolerating that life-cycle in no way renders it good game design.
This ends up compounding with other problems, like the aforementioned decay of value in levels in order to fuel continued vertical progression rather than, say, panning out the player's progression into new venues, classes, skill groups, etc. It's too linear and it's to finite, and the only way it keeps going is, in fact, in a large part due to blind loyalty. Similar reason as to why LoL is so silly-huge, it sits in a position where it has perpetuated itself for a long time on pretty much name and nostalgia.
"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
As I said vast vertical progression in a questhub themepark focused on end game simply makes content a speed bump. It's not hard to understand a design flaw when marginalize over 90% of your content to appease a small percentage of players doing end game content.
WOW for example has a very nice open world that is marginalized by levels, questhubs, fast progression, flying mounts and ques. Imagine WoW same content with no ques to warp people. No levels and forced quest progression to guide people. No quest hubs driving you in quest clusters. You would have a game essentially like Skyrim with pretty good content and classes.
We've also already covered that exploring new places is more appealing than repetitively revisiting old places. So content isn't "marginalized" just because you don't revisit it. Quite the opposite: content is more interesting because it's taking place someplace new, and would generally be less interesting if it took place in the same old place as before.
I don't have to imagine WOW with no teleports. I played MMORPGs like that, and early WOW involved only limited teleportation that required many players to walk someplace manually.
It sucked.
It was a complete waste of time, because it involved a lot of repetition and almost zero thinking/gameplay. Players don't play RPGs to watch a run animation. They play RPGs to do things. The reality is that early MMORPGs were implemented like that to trick players into subscribing longer -- all of the various ways they made their mechanics excessively time-consuming and repetitive were not for the player's benefit, but for their bank account's benefit. (It didn't work that well in the end of course, because you make way more money providing great gameplay than trying to sucker players with overly repetitive garbage, but that was their intent.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
MurderHerd
Leveling is one form of progression. Far from required. The content is marginalized because you don't revisit it all. Once you get to end game you just repeat end game content. That's not new content.
In a levelless system most of the content is available how and when you want to play. The whole world is essentially end game. You go places for a reason and not the yellow brick road told you to or you have no where else level appropriate. The game is about obtaining new abilities, gear, and honing player skill just like a leveled one. It also opens the game up to having areas based on challenge vs. areas based on 1-6 or 35-40 in level with the same flat challenge balanced to your level.
I sincerely hope you eventually discover the irony in this.
"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