I could not agree with you more. This issue has been bugging me for years now. I have been hopping arond in pretty much every mmo out there, and in almost every game I am disgusted to see that everyone start out looking the same. They gain a level or two and get new gear...that all look the same. You reach the endgame and, for example, you see that übercool hunter wearing a ful set of dragonstalker. ooooh. so cool. you have never seen anything like that before! So eventually you get yourself that set. ...you and every other hunter on the server!
Even with "crappy old" the realm, you felt more unique then in todays cookiecutter games. You bought player crafter gear, you named the items yourself and you even dyed them the color you wanted. Hell, even when you found some hott loot you ended up renaming it and changing the color of it, just to make it more "your own".
bah. you could even take a iron longsword, dye it purple and name it The Wrath. (ooh. That's a joke _noone_ will get) and the sideeffect for pvp. Gank mr Olav, the dwarf that's been badmouthing you behind your back. Loot "Olavs undergarments" and then go to the plaza and sell them back to him, infront of everybody.
Randomized items that do not impact the game severely... that's what I want. I prefer relying on my own skill and the intelligence that went into designing my character rather than brute force eq builds.
I almost agreed with this article entirely until the Power Gamer vs. Casual Gamer section. I have a job, I work 50 hours a week, and I have classes on top of that. I get to play a few hours a week and enjoy PvP, which means in most games that I have to be high level and have the best equipment to compete or to find a fight. That takes time... a lot of time... before I can even begin to enjoy the game.
So I log into a leveling service, have them power level my character, buy my gold, and done. Then I head out to PvP, the only part of an MMO I enjoy.
I'm a product of these companies bad planning. I doubt I'm alone.
I wasn't knocking powergamers in the article. On the contrary I think they deserve everything they have...they have worked for it.
I also work long weeks but I choose not to use a powerlevelling service and I therefore very seldom have uber gear...I very seldom reach endgame...but thats not important to me.
If uber loot was so readily available that even casual gamers could easily find a full set then it would be valueless...and no challenge. Finding good items is part of the allure of MMORPG's...and static loot takes away from this.
If loot relied more on random drops...and not just from specific boss mobs which would just be farmed, as they are now, then the more mobs you killed the more chance you would have of finding uber gear...powerlevellers do kill more mobs more quickly...usually anyhow, and therefore deserve more chance of finding good gear.
They work harder at the game, whether or not its because they have more time is irrelevant, thats life.
Notice: The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the reviews of MMORPG.com or its management.
I find that developers have slacked in their ingenuity off how to reward players for their hard work in game between roleplaying, social, and power gamers.
Reward with gear is easy. I find that they should reduce the amount of static loot and exchange it for static raw material. Any crafter whether it be blacksmith, armour, jeweler, tailor, etc. Should be able to use this raw material and create what ever item the player wants.
Let's take that concept further. High level rare raw material should be tagged with a color spectrum. So that crafters can give their customer options in terms of color and be able to focus the special effect the material will have based on their customers specs.
Example:
I killed an Uber mob with my group. We each get 1 piece of high level grade mithril stone from harvesting the mithril vein in the area. High level grade mithril has the color spectrum of 30 colors ranging in the black, grey, white hues. This same mithril lets you focus on a bonus increase to: strength, constition, dex, attack power, or defense. overall total bonus from the stone is +15 which can spread any way you want with in the listed stats above. If you decide to have him focus on one particular stat once the bonus reaches a certain amount in that stat it becomes harder to successfully upgraded it. compared to spreading out the bonus.
Best yet if you decide to sell that said item later. Who ever buys it can have it deconstructed and rebuilt to what they want. You can have a decay value added to it like every time someone does so the bonus total is reduced by 3. But it gives a nice flexibility to the economy and items on the market.
This solves 2 problems
1 people can have different looking equipment in terms of color (maybe even designs also).
2 customizing you equipment to fit you is that much easier
This type of system promotes alot of other good things also.
The crafting profession just became viable. They actually have something to do and the work is not boring and monotonous all the time.
A truly robust economy.
Increased community interaction obviously.
ALSO this way devs dont have to worry about adding in more items. All they have to do is add in more colors and designs for the crafter to use.
Let's look at it from another perspective; we are all farmers ploughing our land, planting crops etc. All our farms are perfectly equal in size and quality, the only difference is while you are out tending your crops I am out socialising, enjoying life while you toil away. Harvest comes around and we all harvest our crops and I notice that my yield is a lot smaller than yours, why is that? I'm sure I don't need to spell out the answer but as this is a word processor I guess I will have to - you put more effort than I did.
Neil...you got it all wrong...starting with the above misguided analogy. You're way off the mark.
Try this one...we both wish to build our own house. We spend an equal amount of money and buy the exact same materials.
I have a job, family, friends, and other commitments. You, however, have no life. You spend all your time building your house while I do my other stuff and tease you by calling you a "powerbuilder with no life".
Your house is done in a week.
Mine gets done in two years. It's the exact same house as yours, looks the same and feels the same. It just took me longer to get it because I did other stuff as well.
Fair? Yup. You powerbuilt yours so got it sooner...I did other stuff and got it later. Same dollar cost...same reward...just at a different pace.
I think this article builds on some wrong assumptions.
When we look a what the players invest in a game it somes down to Time and Money. But even in the most simple games we played as children luck and skill played a large role as well.
In fact the time investment usually builds your skill which you use to play the game. Real Money has nothing to do with who is good at monopoly. Or at playing football for that sake.
Next, I dont see why skill should be the sole parameter that determines how our avatars look. Some links are missing here as well.
Skill might provide you with means which you in turn use to aquire your clothing. The means might be money, it might be stuff you need in production.
To me it seems that it is the fact that skill is left out of the equation that messes the result up.
Skill has been replaced with time and the luck factor is often high. This is what should be fixed. Time invested should result in player skill, not in a percentage chance to get a drop.
Originally posted by MLecl0001 Now if you are talking stats on gear, that is another issue entirely, an issue that isnt thedevelopers fault so much as it is the communities fault. Now developers could add all sorts of different items with different stats that cater to every imagineable play style with one certain class, then do it for every class. However over time the community would settle into a cookie cutter build with cookie cutter items, that optimizes all the "wanted" or "needed" stats for a certain class. This is also fueled by the communities need for the perfect trinity and pigeon holing classes into certain roles.
Actually it is the developers fault. Any intelligent dev knows that there is a system in place. It has lots of numbers and basically let's the devs know the mins and maxes of their game. On things like weapon damage, damage absorbtion, stat caps (Soft or hard), etc. It is the developers' responsibilities to make sure they do not introduce items that break their game. This is why when I first read about WoW having certain items that only one person on the server could acquire I knew the devs were idiots. I knew they would be introducing items that break their game. Such items make PvP a joke, and PvE becomes overly easy for skilled players who are outfitted in this gear. It means that WoW will always be trying to "fix" it's classes, add new PvE content, raising level caps, etc. There will never be balance though. And it is the dev's fault. It's poor system design.
It is pathos we lack, and this lack of pathos makes the worlds we explore quite stale.
Neil...you got it all wrong...starting with the above misguided analogy. You're way off the mark.
Try this one...we both wish to build our own house. We spend an equal amount of money and buy the exact same materials.
I have a job, family, friends, and other commitments. You, however, have no life. You spend all your time building your house while I do my other stuff and tease you by calling you a "powerbuilder with no life".
Your house is done in a week.
Mine gets done in two years. It's the exact same house as yours, looks the same and feels the same. It just took me longer to get it because I did other stuff as well.
Fair? Yup. You powerbuilt yours so got it sooner...I did other stuff and got it later. Same dollar cost...same reward...just at a different pace.
Just like a game.
But the same problem still exists. In MMOreality both people will have spent roughly the same amount of in /build time building their house. It may take you 4 real world weeks where it took me 1 real world week but it took us roughly the same amount of man hours on project to do it. This does not reflect the real world. In an MMO there is no way to be done substantially faster (in game time) by being a more skilled house builder. Anyone who has ever dealt with a contracter knows that skilled ones can get done much faster than a bum. Plus no matter how skilled the player is (not talking about some time dependent in game numerical crafting skill here) he will never build Falling Waters only another copy of the subdivision model. In the current setup in MMOs even if you could build the Taj Mahal everyone else could if they grinded away at it long enough.
There should be some houses that some players can never build, because they just are not good enough at the game. There is no way to make everyone the hero of a story in an MMO and we have taken this to mean that there should be no exceptional individuals in MMOs. Its like we are all being paid to solve Rubix cubes, everytime you solve the cube you get a dollar, but the cubes they gave us only have one color. Everyone solves the cube everytime they twist it. Whoever has the most time to sit there and twist it gets the most money. You cannot be significantly better at soving the cube than anyone else (maybe you can twist it slightly faster). You can achieve just about everything by putting in more time. There is very little benefit to actually being better at the game.
And in all honesty I don't think that current PvP systems are any better. Most of them are heavily gear (= time) defined. Your reflexes play a very small role. There is also very little room for creative stratagies due to the shallowness of the combat systems. Spend a few minutes reading on the internet about what build and what order to use your abilities, then 2 months grinding out your equipment (or levels if the game is level based. Note that they become essentially the same as equipment due to the way you gain them).
I agree with Hakiko, games that allow for static rewards, be it gear or levels, contradict a personally rewarding game. It is just a question of who can grind the fastest. I know there are subtleties to each PvP system, such as playing a Warlock vs. playing a Rogue in WoW, but in the end, the deciding factor will be how much time you've spent in game.
A lot of us probably think this is a conspiracy on the part of developers to keep players in the game so they continue to receive subscription payments. I think that it's just a side-effect of every players desire to be the ultimate Slayer of "Named-Mob Here". Devs want to appeal to every player so they make it possible for all of us to be the best. If MMORPGs were more skill-based, we wouldn't see this problem.
Half the attraction is the action-figure aspect of MMORPGs though. Getting to dress your character up and collect items for him. I think that next-gen MMORPGs will move towards a more dynamic loot system where the player has vast customization for his/her character's appearance and gear while leaning towards a more skill-based design that allows better players the ability to excel quicker. This seems to be the next move towards allowing for a more engaging experience while leveling up.
Where WoW just made it easier for anyone to jump on and get to 60, skill based designs will allow talented players the ability to breeze through content since their advantages will be inherent and not constrained by level caps and the such. This means that MMORPG developers will have to look into creating game worlds that hold audience attention not by artificial means ("Just two more days until level 60 and I can equip my Uber-Great Dragon Destroyer Axe!) but through immersion and complex game mechanics.
I'm hoping this is the evolution we witness, at least. I could be very wrong.
Yes if the system is dynamic enough you won't need to keep adding higher and higher level content. People will keep playing to increase their skill in playing the game...not the equipment their character wears. You could occasionally introduce harder mobs to beat. And I do not mean mobs with more hit points or fire resistance that require better character stats. I mean that in a deep enough system the mobs would take more player skill to defeat.
It would therefore be possible for a natuarally talented player to take on the hardest mobs even if he had never fought the ones before (because he does not need something those mobs drop to beat this one). There would be far more personal satisfaction and fufilment from becoming more skilled than beating the same mob 30 times to get a drop, even if you had to fight a mob 40 times while perfecting your skills. This is why we feel so much pride when we finally accomplish something we have practiced long and hard for, anyone who plays a musical instrument or sport can attest to this.
And its true there will be some monsters that some players will never be good enough to beat, this is the nature of skill based. However this does not diminish your accomplishments. Take this example:
A high school football team that has not won a game in three years pulls together, practices hard and wins the final game of their senior year. Do they immediatly say "Well we will never beat the Dallas Cowboys". No they are proud of their accomplishment they have increased their skill and performed to the best of their abilities. They will always remember that day and be proud of it.
Take a counter example: Your guild completes getting their 1st level of raid gear. Is the overwhelming thought "Well if nothing else we will always have the fact that on this day we were good enough to get this done". No. Its far more likely that while happy to get that raid out of the way everyone is really thinking "But there are still 9 more levels of gear to go"
Comments
This issue has been bugging me for years now.
I have been hopping arond in pretty much every mmo out there, and in almost every game I am disgusted to see that everyone start out looking the same. They gain a level or two and get new gear...that all look the same.
You reach the endgame and, for example, you see that übercool hunter wearing a ful set of dragonstalker.
ooooh. so cool. you have never seen anything like that before!
So eventually you get yourself that set. ...you and every other hunter on the server!
Even with "crappy old" the realm, you felt more unique then in todays cookiecutter games. You bought player crafter gear, you named the items yourself and you even dyed them the color you wanted. Hell, even when you found some hott loot you ended up renaming it and changing the color of it, just to make it more "your own".
bah. you could even take a iron longsword, dye it purple and name it The Wrath. (ooh. That's a joke _noone_ will get)
and the sideeffect for pvp. Gank mr Olav, the dwarf that's been badmouthing you behind your back. Loot "Olavs undergarments" and then go to the plaza and sell them back to him, infront of everybody.
Randomized items that do not impact the game severely... that's what I want. I prefer relying on my own skill and the intelligence that went into designing my character rather than brute force eq builds.
I almost agreed with this article entirely until the Power Gamer vs. Casual Gamer section. I have a job, I work 50 hours a week, and I have classes on top of that. I get to play a few hours a week and enjoy PvP, which means in most games that I have to be high level and have the best equipment to compete or to find a fight. That takes time... a lot of time... before I can even begin to enjoy the game.
So I log into a leveling service, have them power level my character, buy my gold, and done. Then I head out to PvP, the only part of an MMO I enjoy.
I'm a product of these companies bad planning. I doubt I'm alone.
I also work long weeks but I choose not to use a powerlevelling service and I therefore very seldom have uber gear...I very seldom reach endgame...but thats not important to me.
If uber loot was so readily available that even casual gamers could easily find a full set then it would be valueless...and no challenge. Finding good items is part of the allure of MMORPG's...and static loot takes away from this.
If loot relied more on random drops...and not just from specific boss mobs which would just be farmed, as they are now, then the more mobs you killed the more chance you would have of finding uber gear...powerlevellers do kill more mobs more quickly...usually anyhow, and therefore deserve more chance of finding good gear.
They work harder at the game, whether or not its because they have more time is irrelevant, thats life.
Notice: The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the reviews of MMORPG.com or its management.
Neil Thompson
Staff Writer
MMORPG.com
I can aggree with most of the post.
I find that developers have slacked in their ingenuity off how to reward players for their hard work in game between roleplaying, social, and power gamers.
Reward with gear is easy. I find that they should reduce the amount of static loot and exchange it for static raw material. Any crafter whether it be blacksmith, armour, jeweler, tailor, etc. Should be able to use this raw material and create what ever item the player wants.
Let's take that concept further. High level rare raw material should be tagged with a color spectrum. So that crafters can give their customer options in terms of color and be able to focus the special effect the material will have based on their customers specs.
Example:
I killed an Uber mob with my group. We each get 1 piece of high level grade mithril stone from harvesting the mithril vein in the area. High level grade mithril has the color spectrum of 30 colors ranging in the black, grey, white hues. This same mithril lets you focus on a bonus increase to: strength, constition, dex, attack power, or defense. overall total bonus from the stone is +15 which can spread any way you want with in the listed stats above. If you decide to have him focus on one particular stat once the bonus reaches a certain amount in that stat it becomes harder to successfully upgraded it. compared to spreading out the bonus.
Best yet if you decide to sell that said item later. Who ever buys it can have it deconstructed and rebuilt to what they want. You can have a decay value added to it like every time someone does so the bonus total is reduced by 3. But it gives a nice flexibility to the economy and items on the market.
This solves 2 problems
1 people can have different looking equipment in terms of color (maybe even designs also).
2 customizing you equipment to fit you is that much easier
This type of system promotes alot of other good things also.
The crafting profession just became viable. They actually have something to do and the work is not boring and monotonous all the time.
A truly robust economy.
Increased community interaction obviously.
ALSO this way devs dont have to worry about adding in more items. All they have to do is add in more colors and designs for the crafter to use.
Faranthil Tanathalos
EverQuest 1 - Ranger
Star Wars Galaxies - Master Ranger
Everquest2 - Ranger WarhammerOnline - Shadow Warrior
WOW - Hunter
That's right I like bows and arrows.
Neil...you got it all wrong...starting with the above misguided analogy. You're way off the mark.
Try this one...we both wish to build our own house. We spend an equal amount of money and buy the exact same materials.
I have a job, family, friends, and other commitments. You, however, have no life. You spend all your time building your house while I do my other stuff and tease you by calling you a "powerbuilder with no life".
Your house is done in a week.
Mine gets done in two years. It's the exact same house as yours, looks the same and feels the same. It just took me longer to get it because I did other stuff as well.
Fair? Yup. You powerbuilt yours so got it sooner...I did other stuff and got it later. Same dollar cost...same reward...just at a different pace.
Just like a game.
Maybe my anology wasn't the best...though it makes sense to me.
Notice: The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the reviews of MMORPG.com or its management.
Neil Thompson
Staff Writer
MMORPG.com
When we look a what the players invest in a game it somes down to Time
and Money. But even in the most simple games we played as children luck
and skill played a large role as well.
In fact the time investment usually builds your skill which you use to
play the game. Real Money has nothing to do with who is good at
monopoly. Or at playing football for that sake.
Next, I dont see why skill should be the sole parameter that determines
how our avatars look. Some links are missing here as well.
Skill might provide you with means which you in turn use to aquire your
clothing. The means might be money, it might be stuff you need in
production.
To me it seems that it is the fact that skill is left out of the equation that messes the result up.
Skill has been replaced with time and the luck factor is often high.
This is what should be fixed. Time invested should result in player
skill, not in a percentage chance to get a drop.
It is pathos we lack, and this lack of pathos makes the worlds we explore quite stale.
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Antioche
There should be some houses that some players can never build, because they just are not good enough at the game. There is no way to make everyone the hero of a story in an MMO and we have taken this to mean that there should be no exceptional individuals in MMOs. Its like we are all being paid to solve Rubix cubes, everytime you solve the cube you get a dollar, but the cubes they gave us only have one color. Everyone solves the cube everytime they twist it. Whoever has the most time to sit there and twist it gets the most money. You cannot be significantly better at soving the cube than anyone else (maybe you can twist it slightly faster). You can achieve just about everything by putting in more time. There is very little benefit to actually being better at the game.
And in all honesty I don't think that current PvP systems are any better. Most of them are heavily gear (= time) defined. Your reflexes play a very small role. There is also very little room for creative stratagies due to the shallowness of the combat systems. Spend a few minutes reading on the internet about what build and what order to use your abilities, then 2 months grinding out your equipment (or levels if the game is level based. Note that they become essentially the same as equipment due to the way you gain them).
A lot of us probably think this is a conspiracy on the part of developers to keep players in the game so they continue to receive subscription payments. I think that it's just a side-effect of every players desire to be the ultimate Slayer of "Named-Mob Here". Devs want to appeal to every player so they make it possible for all of us to be the best. If MMORPGs were more skill-based, we wouldn't see this problem.
Half the attraction is the action-figure aspect of MMORPGs though. Getting to dress your character up and collect items for him. I think that next-gen MMORPGs will move towards a more dynamic loot system where the player has vast customization for his/her character's appearance and gear while leaning towards a more skill-based design that allows better players the ability to excel quicker. This seems to be the next move towards allowing for a more engaging experience while leveling up.
Where WoW just made it easier for anyone to jump on and get to 60, skill based designs will allow talented players the ability to breeze through content since their advantages will be inherent and not constrained by level caps and the such. This means that MMORPG developers will have to look into creating game worlds that hold audience attention not by artificial means ("Just two more days until level 60 and I can equip my Uber-Great Dragon Destroyer Axe!) but through immersion and complex game mechanics.
I'm hoping this is the evolution we witness, at least. I could be very wrong.
It would therefore be possible for a natuarally talented player to take on the hardest mobs even if he had never fought the ones before (because he does not need something those mobs drop to beat this one). There would be far more personal satisfaction and fufilment from becoming more skilled than beating the same mob 30 times to get a drop, even if you had to fight a mob 40 times while perfecting your skills. This is why we feel so much pride when we finally accomplish something we have practiced long and hard for, anyone who plays a musical instrument or sport can attest to this.
And its true there will be some monsters that some players will never be good enough to beat, this is the nature of skill based. However this does not diminish your accomplishments. Take this example:
A high school football team that has not won a game in three years pulls together, practices hard and wins the final game of their senior year. Do they immediatly say "Well we will never beat the Dallas Cowboys". No they are proud of their accomplishment they have increased their skill and performed to the best of their abilities. They will always remember that day and be proud of it.
Take a counter example:
Your guild completes getting their 1st level of raid gear. Is the overwhelming thought "Well if nothing else we will always have the fact that on this day we were good enough to get this done". No. Its far more likely that while happy to get that raid out of the way everyone is really thinking "But there are still 9 more levels of gear to go"