There will always be a point system of some sort, whether they are visible or not, in RPG's and MMORPG's. Take skill points in UO, whether you want to admit it or not, it's still a form of experience points as it requires repeated actions making you stronger at a certain action and 'more experienced' and thus more skilled at that action.
Taking UO as the example you need this sort of system to raise your str, dex, stamina, etc.
How would you propose RPG's and MMORPG's be built without some sort of piont system... Everyone is max level with max stats for their race/class combo from the start....? I'd pass on that myself, there needs to be a progression system, and either visually or 'under the hood' it will likely always be a point system.
Classes. Utterly ridiculous. Just because your good at one thing does not mean you cannot be good at another. Stupidest Idea EVER.
Especially the restrictions. Like how one class is unable to hold a certain weapon which is so ridiculously unrealistic.
On the other side of the coin, I don't feel you should be able to automatically know how to use and be proficient with just any ole weapon either. With that said, I'd be agreeable to a skill buy system like D&D uses, so that you can 'train' to use weapons that your class normally wouldn't be proficient with.
Massive instancing in MMOs drive me nuts, makes me feel like Im not playing a MMO when I cant even see all the people in the same area, its one of the most anti-social and segregating experiences Ive ever had before , so I avoid these MMOs at all costs with lots of heavy instancing.
"Heroic Mode" instances in WoW. The reality is "Heroic Mode" is the normal difficulty, and "Normal Mode" is ridiculously easy mode. Trivializes exploring instances and dungeons. Everyone sees all of the content immediately after it is released with a fast run through "Normal" mode.
I like questing, but know quite a few people that like to progress by PvP or just grinding mobs. Questing is not a must, actually
That's not really character advancement. Role-playing games include the advancement of the world and your character as a whole
When does MMO questing actually do this? You do the exact same quests as 1000's of other players, with the exact same result, the same basic rewards, and nothing in the game world really changes. Most all MMOs are static, the game world remains the same whether you quest or not.
I recently played the free trial of Vanguard. In order to talk to some NPC's for quests, you had to beat them at a sometimes-frustrating card-game. This was like saying, "we were too lazy to put in multipule dialogue options to explore, so here is your alternative."
Grey vendor trash. Without a doubt. Every time I get some, I can hear the devs laughing at me.
I think Allods is going to try to change that, at least a little. Playing the USA Closed Beta Test 1 I made it to the League capital city and there were vendors for the different classes with USEFUL items, not just some random white useless items like in WoW.
Okay, I basically read through this entire thread and found it interesting, so I suppose I will add to it.
CURRENT QUEST DESIGN: The NPC who stands in one spot for his entire lifetime offering thousands of players the same exact quest. Manrik must have been quite the polygamist.. you would think that after so many people found his wife, the town would start to have suspicions of his primal Mormon tendencies..
THAT VENDOR WHO SELLS POINTLESS THINGS: There are tons of vendors who sell armor, and weapons, and I feel sort of strange about them. What purpose do they serve? Virtually all armor and weapons are better than what they sell.......and I mean the armorsmith who stands next to a forge offering you armor that is very expensive and at the same time, worse than what you are wearing or can create yourself...
LOOT: I agree with people who have complained about loot. If I have to obtain 12 raptor heads from the coast of Stranglethorn Vale, you better bet I am going to round up 12 raptors, take their heads, and walk away. When I find myself standing there, waiting for the whole raptor population to spawn again, as somehow many of them were missing their heads (???) I become a bit frustrated.
LOOT: Spending hours getting to an end-boss and not being able to pick up his robe. Spending hours getting to and end boss and not being able to pick up his sword, which you can physically see in his hand.
ZONES: Treating zones as "stages" instead of living environments. This is a world, that desert over there shouldn't just be reknown for its "wealth of creatures level 30-35"... it should be special! A place people go because it has ____ and ____! Where people go to socialize because of its wealth of _____ and _____! I don't know what these blanks are, because I've never seen a system where zones are seen as living environments..
FACTIONS: there is no reason to split people into factions if there is no reason for those factions to be hostile towards each other in the first place. In WoW, I don't find myself "hating" the other faction... they are just doing the respective same thing as I am. We aren't at "War"... factions like these just take half of the population and make me unable to talk to them. If you are going to include a game with factions, make that the center of the game. Give me missions to sabotage crucial parts of the other faction's infrastructure, give me missions to take over one of their villages and hold it for a certain number of days... ACTUAL DAYS....
QUESTS: The escort quest. Following a person who has an inability to run, yet, walks just slightly faster than you can, so you have to move at a strange pace, and are too preoccupied doing this to understand why the NPC has just sprinted to aggro an entire group of elite mobs that wipe your whole party....
LITTLE KIDS: Whoever put little, vulgar, obscene, disruptive, kids.. into MMOs, should be shot.
THE REMOVAL OF GOOD THINGS: Why does a developer remove a good thing from an MMO??? What about the WoW ranks system? It was quite distinguishing to be able to move up through the ranks, display proudly that you spent hours and hours doing the same thing over and over again in the battlegrounds. It was a symbol of your commitment! Not to mention all of the good things you older MMO players enjoyed in UO and SWG that you frequently nostalgisize about.
LACK OF LAWS: Walking up to a person who is way lower leveled to you and slaughtering them is pointless. I don't walk up to little babies and put a knife in their throat just because they "shouldn't be in a place that I am", or that "I'm trying to teach them a lesson about rolling their character on a PVP version of Earth". I know that randomly killing somebody is wrong. So I don't. In an MMO, I don't randomly kill somebody, as it's wrong, thus. The people who do randomly slaughter a person, to me, seem like the same person who would do something similar in real life, then... or are they just "roleplaying a character where they can do it"?
REPETITION OF COMBAT: 1 2 3 4 2 2 2 2 3 4 2 2 2 2 3 4 "You gained 100 Experience". 1 2 3 4 2 2 2 2 3 4 2 2 2 2 3 4 "You gained 100 Experience". Give me some dynamic! Make me have to decide which abilities to use instead of coming up with a plan as to which "system" I should follow. I would rather be reactionary than just do the same thing over and over again.
LACK OF LIVING WORLD: Reduce the reliance on NPC's for everything. Include some of the game developers in the game... have them give players quests and give certain players reknown for doing them... these meaningful quests that would be very difficult and only last for a certain amount of time....
LACK OF RANDOMLY COOL THINGS: let my character automatically create a journal of the things he has seen and how this has changed him throughout everything he has slaughtered and been through. Perhaps decimating entire populations of bears for days to collect a single piece of "brindled leather" has left my character having nightmares about killing bears.. just reading something like that in a journal would be randomly cool to me.
SHIFT TOWARDS COMBAT ARCADE: There should be more to things than just progressing your character towards combat... combat should be a separate and equal aspect to the game to other things, such as being a member of a society and being a vital member of the economy thus. I don't just want to be a cliche "warrior who saves the world along with my thousands of other warriors that are exactly like m doing the same thing". I want to be an ordinary person who is depedent on those thousands of other people to do their role to maintain a certain society. My plan, is to have a sort of "city state" system... where the developers and players work in a synergy to maintain their "city state". You are loyal exclusively to your own "city state", could engage in with relations with friendly city states, and the diplomacy of the actions and progression of players could determine the hostility levels between these "city states"... just an idea.
"Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up." - Robert DeNiro
if you play non-online games you are basically contradicting yourself with this thread. 'freedom' is what people want in their games but you will never be able to have 100% freedom, especially with non-online games...which we all do play. you complain about MMOs and what they lack but you probably also play games that are not online which are completely linear. it's an oxymoron.
Any sort of Global, Aution or Zone chat. It kills the whole atmosphere, makes gold selling easy and just adds useless spam.
I would rather see people standing in a tavern and setting up a party or just having a chat, with people who are already there - than seeing the LFM, WTB spam in every game.
Edit: AND no death penalty. It just makes dying so meaningless, kills grouping and adds retardness on some occasions.
PvE servers. Kinda throws immersion out the window when you see a member of the opposite faction attacking your NPCs but can't do anything about it. Stealth.
If I'm not mistaken it's common in MMO's that when an opposing faction attacks NPC's of your faction that it automatically flags them for PvP.. You just have to switch your flag to PvP and attack.
if you play non-online games you are basically contradicting yourself with this thread. 'freedom' is what people want in their games but you will never be able to have 100% freedom, especially with non-online games...which we all do play. you complain about MMOs and what they lack but you probably also play games that are not online which are completely linear. it's an oxymoron.
Hmm, thread is "dumbest MMO mechanic...". Are you lost? If you are just trying to be a douche bag at least try to make some sense, and not use words that you don't understand.
Wow's new cross server LFG thing.Totally ruins the idea of taking a group and going to fight a dungeon and changes it into a game like Left for Dead where you're grouped with players and automatically put into in instance. Convenient, but kinda turns the game into something its not.
Comments
There will always be a point system of some sort, whether they are visible or not, in RPG's and MMORPG's. Take skill points in UO, whether you want to admit it or not, it's still a form of experience points as it requires repeated actions making you stronger at a certain action and 'more experienced' and thus more skilled at that action.
Taking UO as the example you need this sort of system to raise your str, dex, stamina, etc.
How would you propose RPG's and MMORPG's be built without some sort of piont system... Everyone is max level with max stats for their race/class combo from the start....? I'd pass on that myself, there needs to be a progression system, and either visually or 'under the hood' it will likely always be a point system.
It's a convenience issue for me. I don't want to be forced to 'set up' shop and miss out on other action, IE questing, hunting, farming etc.
Especially the restrictions. Like how one class is unable to hold a certain weapon which is so ridiculously unrealistic.
On the other side of the coin, I don't feel you should be able to automatically know how to use and be proficient with just any ole weapon either. With that said, I'd be agreeable to a skill buy system like D&D uses, so that you can 'train' to use weapons that your class normally wouldn't be proficient with.
Massive instancing in MMOs drive me nuts, makes me feel like Im not playing a MMO when I cant even see all the people in the same area, its one of the most anti-social and segregating experiences Ive ever had before , so I avoid these MMOs at all costs with lots of heavy instancing.
tab target then press 123, tab target then press 123, and on and on and on.
Playing Darkfall EU1 Server
PvE servers. Kinda throws immersion out the window when you see a member of the opposite faction attacking your NPCs but can't do anything about it.
Stealth.
The Official God FAQ
"Heroic Mode" instances in WoW. The reality is "Heroic Mode" is the normal difficulty, and "Normal Mode" is ridiculously easy mode. Trivializes exploring instances and dungeons. Everyone sees all of the content immediately after it is released with a fast run through "Normal" mode.
Snakes that kick !!!! well that was kinda funny at first but really Animals that hardly ever drop pelts teeth and meat. I mean really now.
- Grind.
- Bind on wathever.
- Autoattack.
- Hellish amount of levels.
- Endgame.
That's not really character advancement. Role-playing games include the advancement of the world and your character as a whole
When does MMO questing actually do this? You do the exact same quests as 1000's of other players, with the exact same result, the same basic rewards, and nothing in the game world really changes. Most all MMOs are static, the game world remains the same whether you quest or not.
Not to mention - slimes that dodge.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
I recently played the free trial of Vanguard. In order to talk to some NPC's for quests, you had to beat them at a sometimes-frustrating card-game. This was like saying, "we were too lazy to put in multipule dialogue options to explore, so here is your alternative."
I think Allods is going to try to change that, at least a little. Playing the USA Closed Beta Test 1 I made it to the League capital city and there were vendors for the different classes with USEFUL items, not just some random white useless items like in WoW.
Okay, I basically read through this entire thread and found it interesting, so I suppose I will add to it.
CURRENT QUEST DESIGN: The NPC who stands in one spot for his entire lifetime offering thousands of players the same exact quest. Manrik must have been quite the polygamist.. you would think that after so many people found his wife, the town would start to have suspicions of his primal Mormon tendencies..
THAT VENDOR WHO SELLS POINTLESS THINGS: There are tons of vendors who sell armor, and weapons, and I feel sort of strange about them. What purpose do they serve? Virtually all armor and weapons are better than what they sell.......and I mean the armorsmith who stands next to a forge offering you armor that is very expensive and at the same time, worse than what you are wearing or can create yourself...
LOOT: I agree with people who have complained about loot. If I have to obtain 12 raptor heads from the coast of Stranglethorn Vale, you better bet I am going to round up 12 raptors, take their heads, and walk away. When I find myself standing there, waiting for the whole raptor population to spawn again, as somehow many of them were missing their heads (???) I become a bit frustrated.
LOOT: Spending hours getting to an end-boss and not being able to pick up his robe. Spending hours getting to and end boss and not being able to pick up his sword, which you can physically see in his hand.
ZONES: Treating zones as "stages" instead of living environments. This is a world, that desert over there shouldn't just be reknown for its "wealth of creatures level 30-35"... it should be special! A place people go because it has ____ and ____! Where people go to socialize because of its wealth of _____ and _____! I don't know what these blanks are, because I've never seen a system where zones are seen as living environments..
FACTIONS: there is no reason to split people into factions if there is no reason for those factions to be hostile towards each other in the first place. In WoW, I don't find myself "hating" the other faction... they are just doing the respective same thing as I am. We aren't at "War"... factions like these just take half of the population and make me unable to talk to them. If you are going to include a game with factions, make that the center of the game. Give me missions to sabotage crucial parts of the other faction's infrastructure, give me missions to take over one of their villages and hold it for a certain number of days... ACTUAL DAYS....
QUESTS: The escort quest. Following a person who has an inability to run, yet, walks just slightly faster than you can, so you have to move at a strange pace, and are too preoccupied doing this to understand why the NPC has just sprinted to aggro an entire group of elite mobs that wipe your whole party....
LITTLE KIDS: Whoever put little, vulgar, obscene, disruptive, kids.. into MMOs, should be shot.
THE REMOVAL OF GOOD THINGS: Why does a developer remove a good thing from an MMO??? What about the WoW ranks system? It was quite distinguishing to be able to move up through the ranks, display proudly that you spent hours and hours doing the same thing over and over again in the battlegrounds. It was a symbol of your commitment! Not to mention all of the good things you older MMO players enjoyed in UO and SWG that you frequently nostalgisize about.
LACK OF LAWS: Walking up to a person who is way lower leveled to you and slaughtering them is pointless. I don't walk up to little babies and put a knife in their throat just because they "shouldn't be in a place that I am", or that "I'm trying to teach them a lesson about rolling their character on a PVP version of Earth". I know that randomly killing somebody is wrong. So I don't. In an MMO, I don't randomly kill somebody, as it's wrong, thus. The people who do randomly slaughter a person, to me, seem like the same person who would do something similar in real life, then... or are they just "roleplaying a character where they can do it"?
REPETITION OF COMBAT: 1 2 3 4 2 2 2 2 3 4 2 2 2 2 3 4 "You gained 100 Experience". 1 2 3 4 2 2 2 2 3 4 2 2 2 2 3 4 "You gained 100 Experience". Give me some dynamic! Make me have to decide which abilities to use instead of coming up with a plan as to which "system" I should follow. I would rather be reactionary than just do the same thing over and over again.
LACK OF LIVING WORLD: Reduce the reliance on NPC's for everything. Include some of the game developers in the game... have them give players quests and give certain players reknown for doing them... these meaningful quests that would be very difficult and only last for a certain amount of time....
LACK OF RANDOMLY COOL THINGS: let my character automatically create a journal of the things he has seen and how this has changed him throughout everything he has slaughtered and been through. Perhaps decimating entire populations of bears for days to collect a single piece of "brindled leather" has left my character having nightmares about killing bears.. just reading something like that in a journal would be randomly cool to me.
SHIFT TOWARDS COMBAT ARCADE: There should be more to things than just progressing your character towards combat... combat should be a separate and equal aspect to the game to other things, such as being a member of a society and being a vital member of the economy thus. I don't just want to be a cliche "warrior who saves the world along with my thousands of other warriors that are exactly like m doing the same thing". I want to be an ordinary person who is depedent on those thousands of other people to do their role to maintain a certain society. My plan, is to have a sort of "city state" system... where the developers and players work in a synergy to maintain their "city state". You are loyal exclusively to your own "city state", could engage in with relations with friendly city states, and the diplomacy of the actions and progression of players could determine the hostility levels between these "city states"... just an idea.
"Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up." - Robert DeNiro
Ts/Vent/Mic, it killed the laid back PvP and made a serious business...
You know it, the best way to realize your dreams is waking up and start moving, never lose hope and always keep up.
Respawn of mobs, npcs, bosses, AND player characters
Teleporting.
What is the point of exploring the world and looking at all the cool artwork if you can just blink past it all to the boss fight?
if you play non-online games you are basically contradicting yourself with this thread. 'freedom' is what people want in their games but you will never be able to have 100% freedom, especially with non-online games...which we all do play. you complain about MMOs and what they lack but you probably also play games that are not online which are completely linear. it's an oxymoron.
Full Quest Log
I know its minor but its the stupidest little thing that annoys me
Any sort of Global, Aution or Zone chat. It kills the whole atmosphere, makes gold selling easy and just adds useless spam.
I would rather see people standing in a tavern and setting up a party or just having a chat, with people who are already there - than seeing the LFM, WTB spam in every game.
Edit: AND no death penalty. It just makes dying so meaningless, kills grouping and adds retardness on some occasions.
If I'm not mistaken it's common in MMO's that when an opposing faction attacks NPC's of your faction that it automatically flags them for PvP.. You just have to switch your flag to PvP and attack.
Hmm, thread is "dumbest MMO mechanic...". Are you lost? If you are just trying to be a douche bag at least try to make some sense, and not use words that you don't understand.
Wow's new cross server LFG thing.Totally ruins the idea of taking a group and going to fight a dungeon and changes it into a game like Left for Dead where you're grouped with players and automatically put into in instance. Convenient, but kinda turns the game into something its not.
Early in this thread there were a lot of comments on Permadeath.
To simply write off permadeath is a mistake.
In the right game... in context... can work and even improve the game.
I can demonstrate this to you all...for free.
Play DDO (free to play)
Try grouping. Many of the dungeons are just zergfests. Players running ahead, hacking and slaying. Running through traps...aggroing huge mobs.
Why? Next to no death penalty. Res Shines.
Now, join a permadeath guild.
Notice the complete difference in gameplay. It's like a whole different game and a whole different community.
No more zerging.
Players actually relying on each others skills to keep them alive.
And it's not just others that change - you change too. Your whole perspective on the game changes.
Try it. It's free.
In context permadeath works.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
This. Game systems have to be designed from the beginning with this in mind. WoW + Permadeath? err, no thanks.