At max level in WoW, you advance your character through gear.
The real conundrum here is why people like the OP never realize that gear advancement IS character advancement. The same person is most likely assuming that "endgame" is "raiding for gear" so that they can get stronger.
I don't understand. Do these people really prefer gear advancement as their primary means of character advancement? Or are they just burned out on WoW and the way it rushes you through a boring solo quest grind before they actually interact with other players? Explain this to me!
i think there should be more character advancement in an mmo other than gear treadmill. honestly i like runing an instance a couple of times but weather i get gear i want out of it or not i just can't run them over and over and over its just boring in a good group. honestly i like running pugs just for the fact you have no idea how they'll go where in a static guild group you can run it in your sleep and no worries.
i for one really liked Everquest Online Adventures master class system,at 60 you still got exp to go twards buffing stats and gaining extra abilities,raiders and non-raiders alike grouped up together ALL THE TIME and group grind. in every MMO other than eqoa i had very very small buddy lists, because anymore most people guild up with their friends so there is just no need for it. but in EQOA i had to scroll down a few pages to see them all, most was in different guilds and like me not all raided but raiders like grouping up just to grind out some CMs. in games like that you was much better off being social and having a healthy buddy list or you'd be sitting in the LFG for hours. get in a gorup some one has to leave, check the list see whos on and if they wanna come out to where your party is.
another way to advance your class was you could go out and get a Were infection and there was several to choose from. werewolf,werelion,weregator,werebear, and wererat could also go out and get turned Vampire. don't like those could go out and become a Werehunter.and that was ontop of the 4-6 different Class Mastery choices. all could and usually was done after max level some HAD to be gotten after max level.
if crappy ass SOE hadn't stopped supporting that game i'd still be playing it
Yes, that was the idea. Instead of spending ages levelling from 79 to 80 you can level from 790 to 800 in 10 smaller chunks. The content stays exactly the same, only the numbers change.
That all sounds fine except for one thing: When you have that many levels they get pointless. Do away with them altogether and give the player an improvement point instead he/she can buy something for.
More than 20 levels (as D&D invented) has no real meaning. I don't buy the crap that it is to teach the players the new skills or to make things smoother.
Making more levels make no sense, it is the time to improve that really matters, making a thousand levels really wont make the game more fun than DDO which have 20.
Levels are anyways just a way to simulate experience simple. Just giving the player a point sometimes and allowing him/her to buy improvement would really do wonder for customization, some skills or abilities woul force you to save up points. And of course should there be say 3 different default buttons players who don't want to customize could click on.
The real conundrum here is why people like the OP never realize that gear advancement IS character advancement. The same person is most likely assuming that "endgame" is "raiding for gear" so that they can get stronger.
I don't understand. Do these people really prefer gear advancement as their primary means of character advancement? Or are they just burned out on WoW and the way it rushes you through a boring solo quest grind before they actually interact with other players? Explain this to me!
Yes, they do. But they are FPS players, not RPG players.
I think MMOs will split up into 2 groups really soon, MMORPGs and MMOFPS.
In most FPS games you advance with gear and prefering that is fine as long as there are other games focusing on other stuff.
The 2 extremes are one game with no attributes or skills, you get everything from the gear and one game where you don't improve your gear at all, just your character and can play the entire game with your starting gear (TCoS were actually pretty close to this even if you could improve your gear with some kind of runes).
Both those actually works and neither is a problem for me. What is a problem is that almost all MMOs are so similar to eachother and always steal as much as possible from other games, it means little diversity and if you don't like somethinbg you can't get a modern game without that.
Originally posted by Loke666 More than 20 levels (as D&D invented) has no real meaning. I don't buy the crap that it is to teach the players the new skills or to make things smoother. Making more levels make no sense, it is the time to improve that really matters, making a thousand levels really wont make the game more fun than DDO which have 20.
That's wrong for several reasons. First, DDO has way more than 20 levels (every level is actually 4 or so "chunks", each of whose gives a small improvement). That's because people usually likes having a more constant stream of improvements than few big "jumps". In other words, you can have whatever number of levels you want, but most MMO games settle for 50 to 90 "advancements", however they name them (be it "you are now level 46" or "you are now level 11, 3rd section of 4", or however complex you make it).
First of all: As a old pen and paper player is it my opinion that the powergap in all MMOs between new chracaters and old characters are way too large. Of course the character should get better when you play but going from clumsy farmer to demigod is just too much.
But it is my feeling that character advancement really shouldn't stop ever, just getting really slow. Today have all this been moved to gear but I prefer if the player once in a while gets a new skill, improve an old or raise an attribute.
I also feel that maybe we should rethink a little what you get experience for. Killing trashmobs really wont make anyone better. I think the best might be mixing experience points with achivement instead of giving loads of xp for doing the same thing. It would allow good players with less time to advance as fast as bad players who have a lot of time on their hands . . .
As for levels, skill based games where you raise the skills you use or skill/attribute based systems where you get points and place them out yourself, all 3 works fine for me. They are all just simple mechanics to simulate experience, what really matters is how much you can improve your toon.
Well thought out, and I totally agree.
XP and levels are artifacts of the old pen-and-paper systems, and in my opinion they have not translated well into the new electronic format. The most serious problem is that, prior to "end-game", they spread players out too much, often resulting in friends not being able to play together until they all hit endgame. But also, many other issues as highlighted above.
I strongly favor open skill advancement and open content. EVE is definitely a big step in the right direction (although I favor more active advancement of skills rather than background learning as used in EVE).
I also feel that advancement should be linked to achievements rather than the XP mill. As soon as games started moving away from grinding gold for the best items and toward an achievement system for obtaining the best items, the "end-game" improved radically. Why can't the same be done for experience and skill improvement?
One other thought: a passive, built-in system that slows advancement for players who are "out in front" while speeding it up for players who are following behind. Doing away with the XP/gold grind would be necessary for that, as the grind directly favors players with the most time to dump on the game. But if advancement were to be based on achievements, and once some players accomplished those achievements they became easier for other players, it would help keep the players closer together in advancement while also providing a reward for those determined to be out in front. (E.g., in WoW "vanilla" the first guilds to do the MC had a steep hill to climb while Fire Resist was as rare as hen's teeth, while those who followed behind them could pick up second-hand materials for Fire Resist on the cheap and make progress much more quickly.)
This is the big question. I played Matrix Online, which capped at level 50, which you could reach in a couple weeks. I also played Ultima Online, which was skill-based and could take a year or more to max out your skills. Personally, I preferred UO, but that is, of course, simply preference.
I think developers need to think outside the box to truly tackle this question. I don't think the future of gaming will involve such a linear view of progression.
I played lineage 2 and never touched cap (always close).
I played LOTRO and easily hit cap.
I prefer how Lineage 2 does it.
(hmmm lot of I's up there).
The thing is, leveling was what one did but it wasn't really what the game was about. I think this is the issue here. leveling was only one part of the game. The rest of the game was more about pvp or crafting/making money/clan-alliance relationships, trying to get people for certain raids, etc.
So for me a long leveling curve is opiumum, maybe even an alternate advancement track. However, I want the thrust of the game to be there from lvl 1 through all my levels. Being higher lvl just makes me better at it.
I found leveling in Lineage 2 to offer me an enjoyable rate of advancement, however I found LOTRO and WAR to be insufferable grinds. Lineage 2, as you point out, gave me crafting, PVP and clan activities above and beyond just levelling. Leveling became something for me to do while doing other things as opposed to leveling just to get to a higher level or, worse, leveling to catch up with everyone else who is racing to the cap to do endgame content.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Level progression should in fact be approached differently than it traditionally has been. While some people want to be the "nobody" in a game, those people are generally not a common as those who want to be the "hero". With this in mind level progression should be based around the hero trope.
One way to look at it would be what are the stages of heroic behavior?
Stage 1 - Training/discovery: Even in most Hollywood movies heroes don't usually start out at their peak, this stage is basically the stage where you fight the ubiquitous "rats" and other such trash mobs. Your unique special snowflake like qualities have been discovered and you begin your rise to fame.
Stage 2 - Saving the world: Now that you've train it is time to save the world (usually repeatedly for a good hero). This is the stage of the game that should be devoted to heroic quests be they dungeon crawls or some other iteration on the concept. This is not the "bring me ten goblin pelts" gameplay and really once you've trained that kind of gameplay should never rear its head again (sadly it does).
Optional (never done) Stage 3 - With power comes responsibilities: Let's be honest most heroes once they've saved the world on more than one occasion find themselves thrust into a position of power. Aside from Bond or similar characters who never really seem to progress, most heroic characters in some ways become leaders. Superman has his Jutice League, Conan and Arthur became kings, Luke eventually restarts the Jedi temple under his tuetalage. This stage would actually be a shift in gameplay from the simple fp style rpg potentially to a RTS, resource and control game with the possibility for both PvE and PvP gameplay. Think of it like this, you've earned your place among the rulers, now you get a "area" to rule. It is the logical next step in MMO character progress.
Optional (never done) Stage 4 - Passing the torch: Though not as common as the above tropes one of the many heroic tropes is that every hero dies or gets old (some defy this, but not all). Green Latern is an example here, Luke too had the torched passed to him from Obi wan and Yoda. This would be a great way to promote Alts or even NPC hirelings. It would add another interesting element to character progression when you are managing more than one flow of progress.
Edit: Connected to this I'd also like to see a game where your gear grows with you, and is a part of your progression. I mean Arthur never traded in excalibur for a better model or the Baggins looking to replace Sting, sure Luke had to build a new lightsaber, but he's only been through like two. I'd love a game that treats gear as a part of the character customization and the level and ability of the gear is more a part of my characters growth than an aspect of some hidden in game economy.
Hard to please everyone and some advance super fast eather by 24/7 online or exploits cheating.
But in Darkfall a avarage person takes at least 2 years to max out most and prolly still not have max all, it have chanced alot now becouse of meditation so prolly faster now.
But to long and to much grind lead to frustration and boredom it can kill off the game.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
In most FPS games you advance with gear and prefering that is fine as long as there are other games focusing on other stuff.
Nothing wrong with preferring gear advancement, but its really just a replacement for "levels" or allocating stats. Any type of advancement is character advancement and makes a game very RPG-like. Its just another way to skin the cat.
What confuses me is why people assume the a level system, a stat allocation system, and a gear system are different. They all make your character stronger over time. The scale of that advancement and how you measure your advancement are separate and different topics.
Originally posted by Gudrunix I strongly favor open skill advancement and open content. EVE is definitely a big step in the right direction (although I favor more active advancement of skills rather than background learning as used in EVE).
Even EVE's system is no different. What is the first thing you do before you decide to attack someone in EVE? You check their employment history to see their character age. You don't want to attack an older character because they would have a more advanced character than you. If CCP simply saved you the legwork of doing date mathematics (EVE loves making you do basic math, the bastards) and tagged the character with an age (probably the number of months since character creation) then it would be the exact same as a "level". Just another way to skin that cat.
Nearly every game whether its skill based, level based, or gear based is going to have some indication of advancement. "Level" based systems are popular because it provides a simply human readable number to indicate advancement.
Having said that, I don't like a level number to have a game mechanic tied to it. Such as WoW having a hard coded miss rate based on level difference. Your other character attributes should be the deciding factor.
Despite being a level based system, DDO does not have artificial mechanics directly tied to your level. The closest thing is the BaB (which is determined by your class and level), but "level" as a variable is not used in combat.
This is the big question. I played Matrix Online, which capped at level 50, which you could reach in a couple weeks. I also played Ultima Online, which was skill-based and could take a year or more to max out your skills. Personally, I preferred UO, but that is, of course, simply preference.
I think developers need to think outside the box to truly tackle this question. I don't think the future of gaming will involve such a linear view of progression.
I played lineage 2 and never touched cap (always close).
I played LOTRO and easily hit cap.
I prefer how Lineage 2 does it.
(hmmm lot of I's up there).
The thing is, leveling was what one did but it wasn't really what the game was about. I think this is the issue here. leveling was only one part of the game. The rest of the game was more about pvp or crafting/making money/clan-alliance relationships, trying to get people for certain raids, etc.
So for me a long leveling curve is opiumum, maybe even an alternate advancement track. However, I want the thrust of the game to be there from lvl 1 through all my levels. Being higher lvl just makes me better at it.
I found leveling in Lineage 2 to offer me an enjoyable rate of advancement, however I found LOTRO and WAR to be insufferable grinds. Lineage 2, as you point out, gave me crafting, PVP and clan activities above and beyond just levelling. Leveling became something for me to do while doing other things as opposed to leveling just to get to a higher level or, worse, leveling to catch up with everyone else who is racing to the cap to do endgame content.
exactly.
you levelled in Lineage 2 but it wasn't the point of the game. one could be a lvl 53 character and still come to a siege. They might get obliterated but every army needs someone to distract ; )
The point is, in a game like Lineage 2, your level was your efficacy, no more or less.
But in a game like LOTRO, your level is strictly about being able to take quests or explore a particular area.
This is not to say that there were lvl 10 players who were raiding in L2 but it was possible to do a raid with slightly lower lvl players and just more of them. Orfen comes to mind.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Player advancement should never end, players should be able to improve even after palying for 2 years, and i dont mean by new items i mean by stats / levels, even if it takes 1 week of playing to mak hardly any difference, i come from a past of mmorpgs with huge grind, i played myth of soma for years, i couldnt kill the toughest mobs, i had high skill in swords and was one of the best sword masters in game but there was always loads of players better than me that had put in the grind, thats how it should be.
No matter how good you are there should always be more to strive for, you have to work for it, and difference may be negligable but it should be there.
Ex. myth of soma, legend of mir, mu online and eudemons online player.
Current game : Runescape (until pc build is complete)
Nearly every game whether its skill based, level based, or gear based is going to have some indication of advancement. "Level" based systems are popular because it provides a simply human readable number to indicate advancement.
Having said that, I don't like a level number to have a game mechanic tied to it. Such as WoW having a hard coded miss rate based on level difference. Your other character attributes should be the deciding factor.
Despite being a level based system, DDO does not have artificial mechanics directly tied to your level. The closest thing is the BaB (which is determined by your class and level), but "level" as a variable is not used in combat.
It's true that a simple human readable number is appealing, but there's another major reason why level-based systems are used. It's much easier to gauge a character's readiness to take on Challenge X if there is one number to look at.
I'm designing an ice drake mob. How much HP should it have? How high is its Magic Resistance? How hard and how accurately does it hit, how fast can it move, and does its breath hit one target or a cone? Once I have all that figured out, how much of a reward does it give in terms of money and sellable items, gear, and skill points? This is all pretty easy if you can assign the drake a level and simply say: This is a level 32 mob. It should have HP that a level 32 DPS can burn through in X seconds and a level 32 non-DPS in Y seconds. A level 32 magic user should get X% of their spells resisted. A level 32 tank should get hit for X% of their max HP. It should drop level 32 gear and give X experience points.
You can even go as far as putting the drake in an instance that only levels 26-34 can enter, so that you know that it will pose the appropriate challenge. Having levels gives developers control over your character, which then allows them to craft an appropriate challenge for you.
Without levels, it becomes a lot harder to make sure that the mobs' difficulty and rewards are appropriate to the characters you want to fight them. If someone could have Dodge Rank 3 or Dodge Rank 20, how do you know how high to set the drake's accuracy? If they could have 1000 HP or 7000, how much damage should it do? It's also more difficult for players to group up because they don't know who has the same fighting potential as they do; it's probably not enough to just compare their highest ranks.
I don't have a problem with level being used as a factor in combat mechanics. It's the most straightforward way of pushing players towards a certain level of content while still allowing them some leeway to take on stronger things.
At max level in WoW, you advance your character through gear.
The real conundrum here is why people like the OP never realize that gear advancement IS character advancement. The same person is most likely assuming that "endgame" is "raiding for gear" so that they can get stronger.
My appologies for being unclear. I know full well that in most leveling games gear tiers are, for all practical purposes, a level buff. So when I throw the idea of an all-endgame game onto the table, what I mean is that you would be no level prerequisite, no gear prerequisite for a plotline, dungeon or raid ... it wouldn't matter if you went to the dwarven kingdom or the elven kingdom first.
Experience has traditionally been the great motivator. The endgame started as a bone to toss to people who have ground their way through the planned levels. Now we've reached a situation in game design where people will happily keep playing after reaching the level cap. even sometimes treating the grind through the levels as a barrier to reaching the endgame rather than the primary motivation. Yes, gear grinds are traditionally added to the endgame as a pseudo-leveling system, but if levels aren't the main motivation any more, are gear grinds really required either?
So my intellectual excerise to the reader is to imagine your favorite game without power advancement. The character you create is the character you play. The dwarves may offer long chains of tasks to learn their decorative crafts, tolerences to poisonous vapours may need to be build up or dungeons might still be filled with checklists of ever-rarer treasures to recover. But what if none of the little rewards along the way actually said "+1 damage"?
So my intellectual excerise to the reader is to imagine your favorite game without power advancement. The character you create is the character you play. The dwarves may offer long chains of tasks to learn their decorative crafts, tolerences to poisonous vapours may need to be build up or dungeons might still be filled with checklists of ever-rarer treasures to recover. But what if none of the little rewards along the way actually said "+1 damage"?
Then the rewards you get out of those quests/tasks have to be 'cool' enough to warrant doing them and/or the quests/tasks have to be fun enough that you would do them without a reward.
Personally I am tired/weary of gamers of other genres trying to make mmorpgs into those other genres. Getting developers to dumb down the concept of risk/reward, removing "most" of the journey that is supposed to be a part of the fun of playing a mmorpg. Players who play first person shooters don't want character developement, role-play, they want to get to one thing, player vs player competition. nothing wrong with that, but they shouldn't keep trying to make mmorpgs into a variation of a FPS.
Like life, mmorpgs are about the journey, not the destination. Experiencing, exploring, interacting, strife, achieving, things of this nature that take time and investment in order to achieve. When you have to put time and effort into something, the achievements, goals or rewards mean alot more. These things have all become very diminished in recent years due to how game designers design games to fit what players of other genres who know play mmorpgs want.
Like life, mmorpgs are about the journey, not the destination.
So, just to be clear ... you are arguing that you can't have a journey without levels? Or that levels/advancement are a distraction from what MMORPGs should be in your eyes?
( I ask because not all early pencil and paper RPGs had level advancement - if you take a game like Traveller for example, all your rank and skill development happened during character creation; Even early online RPGs had a whole subgenre, MUSHes, which were focused on storytelling and status rather than levelling; on the other hand, there is a sort of ideal of the ever-deeper dungeon, ever greater power that runs through a lot of my early memories of CRPGs ... you played until the dungeon ran out of levels and there's still an echo of that in today's MMOs, even ones with an endgame other than more levels )
edit: looking back at my original post, I'm wondering if my comment questioning if developers are too focused "the hero's journey" might have raise alarm bells for you? I mean that term as as a story archetype ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey ) where you start as a peon and end as an epic hero. Leveling systems tend to push games towards telling this same story over and over (although I would agree it is a very good story to tell)
Honestly, every character should start with the basics in some form of attack to its fullest extent, with tiers to each "skill" that adds additional features. Say for skill points 1-100 affects basic combat accuracy and damage and strikes on the skill "blades". a new character could start with 100 in blades, archery, or attack magic. skill points 101-200 on blades could be parrying for defense bonuses built in and special defensive strikes to go along with the offensive ones. 201-300 could be stances that modify all around blade weapon use (from two hands for two weapons, etc) and 301-400 could be for unlocking new sword swing animations, for spells the same (the last tier being cosmetic mostly in nature)
Now, pure character advancement IMO should be about 6 months for say a desirable build among a few skills to 300/400 under the above to make a fully competent character, with about a year or two for more allowable proficiencies and everything to 400/400.
6 months to high end combat effectiveness, 30 months for a diverse and fully ranked up character
Character advancement doesn't have to have any correlation with an increase in power... look at Guild Wars. You reach the level cap of 20 before you're even 1/4 of the way through the game in prophecies (and before you're even off the newbie island for the later campaigns) yet you continue to gain new skills well beyond that point which are simply different; they are not inherently more potent. Character advancement can come in the form of expanded options and alternative playstyles for your character... it doesn't have to be all about sheer power.
For me; idealy less than a month. Every skill learned and the "best" equipment aquired too, in other words the same kind of standard that offline rpgs offer. Then you can spend the rest of your time developing as a player and enjoying the game... if the game is so good and the endgame is good it has failed if it hopes *endlessly* entice me with more and more items and skills.
Personally I am tired/weary of gamers of other genres trying to make mmorpgs into those other genres. Getting developers to dumb down the concept of risk/reward, removing "most" of the journey that is supposed to be a part of the fun of playing a mmorpg. Players who play first person shooters don't want character developement, role-play, they want to get to one thing, player vs player competition. nothing wrong with that, but they shouldn't keep trying to make mmorpgs into a variation of a FPS.
Like life, mmorpgs are about the journey, not the destination. Experiencing, exploring, interacting, strife, achieving, things of this nature that take time and investment in order to achieve. When you have to put time and effort into something, the achievements, goals or rewards mean alot more. These things have all become very diminished in recent years due to how game designers design games to fit what players of other genres who know play mmorpgs want.
Brilliant post
cheers
**************************** Playing : Uncharted Waters Online ****************************
There is plenty of solutions/substitutes for usual experience leveling, or at least additions. Just look at EQ2:
1. Language quests. Gather items (totems, scrolls of ancient language, inscribbed boxes and so on) to learn monsters language.
2. Special abilities. What I remember best was spell which could have been used on specific type of mob like orc, human, faerie, insects, elementals etc. Tens, maybe hundreds different types of mob, but to use spell on specific type you needed to study it first - gather it's parts and complete set. Also you could get various abilities/spells/spec items with various effects (not usual "+10000 generic stat", but like zap rods for bugs, short range teleporters etc) from finishing quests...
3. Achievement leveling, you can get achievement experience from killing named mobs, exploring areas etc. That would unlock various skill trees and give points, which could make charchter more different from everyone else.
Gear grind works, even though IMO it is boring and idiotic to do same raids for hundreds of times, but because people do it and majority doesnt complain, that is main advancment in MMORPGs nowdays.
IMO advancment should happen always as long as you play, I mean charachter like getting new skills, gaining extra attributes,not only by gear when you hit max level. Also games should encourage player advancment, real person who control charachter. Mainstream dumbed down MMORPG to level where monkey could play it (WoW is best example), like making dungeons only available at certains levels (example: 10-12, 25-26 etc), when you enter raid dungeon it would change randomly so it would be challenging at least few more times. If they would do so even those boring gear raid grinds would be a lot more interesting....
So in my opinion games shouldnt have "end game" as it is nowdays. You should always have at least few possible ways to advance, slowly bit by bit. Thats why I choose skill based games, as pure leveling advancment system is nice if you want to "read" story like WoW...
Personally I am tired/weary of gamers of other genres trying to make mmorpgs into those other genres. Getting developers to dumb down the concept of risk/reward, removing "most" of the journey that is supposed to be a part of the fun of playing a mmorpg. Players who play first person shooters don't want character developement, role-play, they want to get to one thing, player vs player competition. nothing wrong with that, but they shouldn't keep trying to make mmorpgs into a variation of a FPS.
Like life, mmorpgs are about the journey, not the destination. Experiencing, exploring, interacting, strife, achieving, things of this nature that take time and investment in order to achieve. When you have to put time and effort into something, the achievements, goals or rewards mean alot more. These things have all become very diminished in recent years due to how game designers design games to fit what players of other genres who know play mmorpgs want.
I agree with you there. But MMOs should be and is a translation of pen and paper RPG games to a computer in a massive scale. The problem is that after M59 and UO everyone forgot that and never went back and looked on the basics again.
MMOs needs to become more like real RPG games, not like FPS games. The devs should try to go back to basics as well as keeping what makes a MMO a MMO.
MMOFPS games are fine but those should really more evolve from FPS games instead.
Personally I am tired/weary of gamers of other genres trying to make mmorpgs into those other genres. Getting developers to dumb down the concept of risk/reward, removing "most" of the journey that is supposed to be a part of the fun of playing a mmorpg. Players who play first person shooters don't want character developement, role-play, they want to get to one thing, player vs player competition. nothing wrong with that, but they shouldn't keep trying to make mmorpgs into a variation of a FPS.
Like life, mmorpgs are about the journey, not the destination. Experiencing, exploring, interacting, strife, achieving, things of this nature that take time and investment in order to achieve. When you have to put time and effort into something, the achievements, goals or rewards mean alot more. These things have all become very diminished in recent years due to how game designers design games to fit what players of other genres who know play mmorpgs want.
You actually illustrate the problem, however untintentional.
To YOU, mmorpgs are about the journey. You have set in your mind what they should be about, and want everyone else to just accept it and fall in to line.
Comments
The real conundrum here is why people like the OP never realize that gear advancement IS character advancement. The same person is most likely assuming that "endgame" is "raiding for gear" so that they can get stronger.
I don't understand. Do these people really prefer gear advancement as their primary means of character advancement? Or are they just burned out on WoW and the way it rushes you through a boring solo quest grind before they actually interact with other players? Explain this to me!
i think there should be more character advancement in an mmo other than gear treadmill. honestly i like runing an instance a couple of times but weather i get gear i want out of it or not i just can't run them over and over and over its just boring in a good group. honestly i like running pugs just for the fact you have no idea how they'll go where in a static guild group you can run it in your sleep and no worries.
i for one really liked Everquest Online Adventures master class system,at 60 you still got exp to go twards buffing stats and gaining extra abilities,raiders and non-raiders alike grouped up together ALL THE TIME and group grind. in every MMO other than eqoa i had very very small buddy lists, because anymore most people guild up with their friends so there is just no need for it. but in EQOA i had to scroll down a few pages to see them all, most was in different guilds and like me not all raided but raiders like grouping up just to grind out some CMs. in games like that you was much better off being social and having a healthy buddy list or you'd be sitting in the LFG for hours. get in a gorup some one has to leave, check the list see whos on and if they wanna come out to where your party is.
another way to advance your class was you could go out and get a Were infection and there was several to choose from. werewolf,werelion,weregator,werebear, and wererat could also go out and get turned Vampire. don't like those could go out and become a Werehunter.and that was ontop of the 4-6 different Class Mastery choices. all could and usually was done after max level some HAD to be gotten after max level.
if crappy ass SOE hadn't stopped supporting that game i'd still be playing it
That all sounds fine except for one thing: When you have that many levels they get pointless. Do away with them altogether and give the player an improvement point instead he/she can buy something for.
More than 20 levels (as D&D invented) has no real meaning. I don't buy the crap that it is to teach the players the new skills or to make things smoother.
Making more levels make no sense, it is the time to improve that really matters, making a thousand levels really wont make the game more fun than DDO which have 20.
Levels are anyways just a way to simulate experience simple. Just giving the player a point sometimes and allowing him/her to buy improvement would really do wonder for customization, some skills or abilities woul force you to save up points. And of course should there be say 3 different default buttons players who don't want to customize could click on.
Yes, they do. But they are FPS players, not RPG players.
I think MMOs will split up into 2 groups really soon, MMORPGs and MMOFPS.
In most FPS games you advance with gear and prefering that is fine as long as there are other games focusing on other stuff.
The 2 extremes are one game with no attributes or skills, you get everything from the gear and one game where you don't improve your gear at all, just your character and can play the entire game with your starting gear (TCoS were actually pretty close to this even if you could improve your gear with some kind of runes).
Both those actually works and neither is a problem for me. What is a problem is that almost all MMOs are so similar to eachother and always steal as much as possible from other games, it means little diversity and if you don't like somethinbg you can't get a modern game without that.
That's wrong for several reasons. First, DDO has way more than 20 levels (every level is actually 4 or so "chunks", each of whose gives a small improvement). That's because people usually likes having a more constant stream of improvements than few big "jumps". In other words, you can have whatever number of levels you want, but most MMO games settle for 50 to 90 "advancements", however they name them (be it "you are now level 46" or "you are now level 11, 3rd section of 4", or however complex you make it).
Well thought out, and I totally agree.
XP and levels are artifacts of the old pen-and-paper systems, and in my opinion they have not translated well into the new electronic format. The most serious problem is that, prior to "end-game", they spread players out too much, often resulting in friends not being able to play together until they all hit endgame. But also, many other issues as highlighted above.
I strongly favor open skill advancement and open content. EVE is definitely a big step in the right direction (although I favor more active advancement of skills rather than background learning as used in EVE).
I also feel that advancement should be linked to achievements rather than the XP mill. As soon as games started moving away from grinding gold for the best items and toward an achievement system for obtaining the best items, the "end-game" improved radically. Why can't the same be done for experience and skill improvement?
One other thought: a passive, built-in system that slows advancement for players who are "out in front" while speeding it up for players who are following behind. Doing away with the XP/gold grind would be necessary for that, as the grind directly favors players with the most time to dump on the game. But if advancement were to be based on achievements, and once some players accomplished those achievements they became easier for other players, it would help keep the players closer together in advancement while also providing a reward for those determined to be out in front. (E.g., in WoW "vanilla" the first guilds to do the MC had a steep hill to climb while Fire Resist was as rare as hen's teeth, while those who followed behind them could pick up second-hand materials for Fire Resist on the cheap and make progress much more quickly.)
I found leveling in Lineage 2 to offer me an enjoyable rate of advancement, however I found LOTRO and WAR to be insufferable grinds. Lineage 2, as you point out, gave me crafting, PVP and clan activities above and beyond just levelling. Leveling became something for me to do while doing other things as opposed to leveling just to get to a higher level or, worse, leveling to catch up with everyone else who is racing to the cap to do endgame content.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Level progression should in fact be approached differently than it traditionally has been. While some people want to be the "nobody" in a game, those people are generally not a common as those who want to be the "hero". With this in mind level progression should be based around the hero trope.
One way to look at it would be what are the stages of heroic behavior?
Stage 1 - Training/discovery: Even in most Hollywood movies heroes don't usually start out at their peak, this stage is basically the stage where you fight the ubiquitous "rats" and other such trash mobs. Your unique special snowflake like qualities have been discovered and you begin your rise to fame.
Stage 2 - Saving the world: Now that you've train it is time to save the world (usually repeatedly for a good hero). This is the stage of the game that should be devoted to heroic quests be they dungeon crawls or some other iteration on the concept. This is not the "bring me ten goblin pelts" gameplay and really once you've trained that kind of gameplay should never rear its head again (sadly it does).
Optional (never done) Stage 3 - With power comes responsibilities: Let's be honest most heroes once they've saved the world on more than one occasion find themselves thrust into a position of power. Aside from Bond or similar characters who never really seem to progress, most heroic characters in some ways become leaders. Superman has his Jutice League, Conan and Arthur became kings, Luke eventually restarts the Jedi temple under his tuetalage. This stage would actually be a shift in gameplay from the simple fp style rpg potentially to a RTS, resource and control game with the possibility for both PvE and PvP gameplay. Think of it like this, you've earned your place among the rulers, now you get a "area" to rule. It is the logical next step in MMO character progress.
Optional (never done) Stage 4 - Passing the torch: Though not as common as the above tropes one of the many heroic tropes is that every hero dies or gets old (some defy this, but not all). Green Latern is an example here, Luke too had the torched passed to him from Obi wan and Yoda. This would be a great way to promote Alts or even NPC hirelings. It would add another interesting element to character progression when you are managing more than one flow of progress.
Edit: Connected to this I'd also like to see a game where your gear grows with you, and is a part of your progression. I mean Arthur never traded in excalibur for a better model or the Baggins looking to replace Sting, sure Luke had to build a new lightsaber, but he's only been through like two. I'd love a game that treats gear as a part of the character customization and the level and ability of the gear is more a part of my characters growth than an aspect of some hidden in game economy.
Hard to please everyone and some advance super fast eather by 24/7 online or exploits cheating.
But in Darkfall a avarage person takes at least 2 years to max out most and prolly still not have max all, it have chanced alot now becouse of meditation so prolly faster now.
But to long and to much grind lead to frustration and boredom it can kill off the game.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Nothing wrong with preferring gear advancement, but its really just a replacement for "levels" or allocating stats. Any type of advancement is character advancement and makes a game very RPG-like. Its just another way to skin the cat.
What confuses me is why people assume the a level system, a stat allocation system, and a gear system are different. They all make your character stronger over time. The scale of that advancement and how you measure your advancement are separate and different topics.
Even EVE's system is no different. What is the first thing you do before you decide to attack someone in EVE? You check their employment history to see their character age. You don't want to attack an older character because they would have a more advanced character than you. If CCP simply saved you the legwork of doing date mathematics (EVE loves making you do basic math, the bastards) and tagged the character with an age (probably the number of months since character creation) then it would be the exact same as a "level". Just another way to skin that cat.
Nearly every game whether its skill based, level based, or gear based is going to have some indication of advancement. "Level" based systems are popular because it provides a simply human readable number to indicate advancement.
Having said that, I don't like a level number to have a game mechanic tied to it. Such as WoW having a hard coded miss rate based on level difference. Your other character attributes should be the deciding factor.
Despite being a level based system, DDO does not have artificial mechanics directly tied to your level. The closest thing is the BaB (which is determined by your class and level), but "level" as a variable is not used in combat.
exactly.
you levelled in Lineage 2 but it wasn't the point of the game. one could be a lvl 53 character and still come to a siege. They might get obliterated but every army needs someone to distract ; )
The point is, in a game like Lineage 2, your level was your efficacy, no more or less.
But in a game like LOTRO, your level is strictly about being able to take quests or explore a particular area.
This is not to say that there were lvl 10 players who were raiding in L2 but it was possible to do a raid with slightly lower lvl players and just more of them. Orfen comes to mind.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Player advancement should never end, players should be able to improve even after palying for 2 years, and i dont mean by new items i mean by stats / levels, even if it takes 1 week of playing to mak hardly any difference, i come from a past of mmorpgs with huge grind, i played myth of soma for years, i couldnt kill the toughest mobs, i had high skill in swords and was one of the best sword masters in game but there was always loads of players better than me that had put in the grind, thats how it should be.
No matter how good you are there should always be more to strive for, you have to work for it, and difference may be negligable but it should be there.
Ex. myth of soma, legend of mir, mu online and eudemons online player.
Current game : Runescape (until pc build is complete)
5 years.
It's true that a simple human readable number is appealing, but there's another major reason why level-based systems are used. It's much easier to gauge a character's readiness to take on Challenge X if there is one number to look at.
I'm designing an ice drake mob. How much HP should it have? How high is its Magic Resistance? How hard and how accurately does it hit, how fast can it move, and does its breath hit one target or a cone? Once I have all that figured out, how much of a reward does it give in terms of money and sellable items, gear, and skill points? This is all pretty easy if you can assign the drake a level and simply say: This is a level 32 mob. It should have HP that a level 32 DPS can burn through in X seconds and a level 32 non-DPS in Y seconds. A level 32 magic user should get X% of their spells resisted. A level 32 tank should get hit for X% of their max HP. It should drop level 32 gear and give X experience points.
You can even go as far as putting the drake in an instance that only levels 26-34 can enter, so that you know that it will pose the appropriate challenge. Having levels gives developers control over your character, which then allows them to craft an appropriate challenge for you.
Without levels, it becomes a lot harder to make sure that the mobs' difficulty and rewards are appropriate to the characters you want to fight them. If someone could have Dodge Rank 3 or Dodge Rank 20, how do you know how high to set the drake's accuracy? If they could have 1000 HP or 7000, how much damage should it do? It's also more difficult for players to group up because they don't know who has the same fighting potential as they do; it's probably not enough to just compare their highest ranks.
I don't have a problem with level being used as a factor in combat mechanics. It's the most straightforward way of pushing players towards a certain level of content while still allowing them some leeway to take on stronger things.
My appologies for being unclear. I know full well that in most leveling games gear tiers are, for all practical purposes, a level buff. So when I throw the idea of an all-endgame game onto the table, what I mean is that you would be no level prerequisite, no gear prerequisite for a plotline, dungeon or raid ... it wouldn't matter if you went to the dwarven kingdom or the elven kingdom first.
Experience has traditionally been the great motivator. The endgame started as a bone to toss to people who have ground their way through the planned levels. Now we've reached a situation in game design where people will happily keep playing after reaching the level cap. even sometimes treating the grind through the levels as a barrier to reaching the endgame rather than the primary motivation. Yes, gear grinds are traditionally added to the endgame as a pseudo-leveling system, but if levels aren't the main motivation any more, are gear grinds really required either?
So my intellectual excerise to the reader is to imagine your favorite game without power advancement. The character you create is the character you play. The dwarves may offer long chains of tasks to learn their decorative crafts, tolerences to poisonous vapours may need to be build up or dungeons might still be filled with checklists of ever-rarer treasures to recover. But what if none of the little rewards along the way actually said "+1 damage"?
Then the rewards you get out of those quests/tasks have to be 'cool' enough to warrant doing them and/or the quests/tasks have to be fun enough that you would do them without a reward.
Personally I am tired/weary of gamers of other genres trying to make mmorpgs into those other genres. Getting developers to dumb down the concept of risk/reward, removing "most" of the journey that is supposed to be a part of the fun of playing a mmorpg. Players who play first person shooters don't want character developement, role-play, they want to get to one thing, player vs player competition. nothing wrong with that, but they shouldn't keep trying to make mmorpgs into a variation of a FPS.
Like life, mmorpgs are about the journey, not the destination. Experiencing, exploring, interacting, strife, achieving, things of this nature that take time and investment in order to achieve. When you have to put time and effort into something, the achievements, goals or rewards mean alot more. These things have all become very diminished in recent years due to how game designers design games to fit what players of other genres who know play mmorpgs want.
So, just to be clear ... you are arguing that you can't have a journey without levels? Or that levels/advancement are a distraction from what MMORPGs should be in your eyes?
( I ask because not all early pencil and paper RPGs had level advancement - if you take a game like Traveller for example, all your rank and skill development happened during character creation; Even early online RPGs had a whole subgenre, MUSHes, which were focused on storytelling and status rather than levelling; on the other hand, there is a sort of ideal of the ever-deeper dungeon, ever greater power that runs through a lot of my early memories of CRPGs ... you played until the dungeon ran out of levels and there's still an echo of that in today's MMOs, even ones with an endgame other than more levels )
edit: looking back at my original post, I'm wondering if my comment questioning if developers are too focused "the hero's journey" might have raise alarm bells for you? I mean that term as as a story archetype ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey ) where you start as a peon and end as an epic hero. Leveling systems tend to push games towards telling this same story over and over (although I would agree it is a very good story to tell)
Honestly, every character should start with the basics in some form of attack to its fullest extent, with tiers to each "skill" that adds additional features. Say for skill points 1-100 affects basic combat accuracy and damage and strikes on the skill "blades". a new character could start with 100 in blades, archery, or attack magic. skill points 101-200 on blades could be parrying for defense bonuses built in and special defensive strikes to go along with the offensive ones. 201-300 could be stances that modify all around blade weapon use (from two hands for two weapons, etc) and 301-400 could be for unlocking new sword swing animations, for spells the same (the last tier being cosmetic mostly in nature)
Now, pure character advancement IMO should be about 6 months for say a desirable build among a few skills to 300/400 under the above to make a fully competent character, with about a year or two for more allowable proficiencies and everything to 400/400.
6 months to high end combat effectiveness, 30 months for a diverse and fully ranked up character
Character advancement doesn't have to have any correlation with an increase in power... look at Guild Wars. You reach the level cap of 20 before you're even 1/4 of the way through the game in prophecies (and before you're even off the newbie island for the later campaigns) yet you continue to gain new skills well beyond that point which are simply different; they are not inherently more potent. Character advancement can come in the form of expanded options and alternative playstyles for your character... it doesn't have to be all about sheer power.
For me; idealy less than a month. Every skill learned and the "best" equipment aquired too, in other words the same kind of standard that offline rpgs offer. Then you can spend the rest of your time developing as a player and enjoying the game... if the game is so good and the endgame is good it has failed if it hopes *endlessly* entice me with more and more items and skills.
Brilliant post
cheers
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Playing : Uncharted Waters Online
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There is plenty of solutions/substitutes for usual experience leveling, or at least additions. Just look at EQ2:
1. Language quests. Gather items (totems, scrolls of ancient language, inscribbed boxes and so on) to learn monsters language.
2. Special abilities. What I remember best was spell which could have been used on specific type of mob like orc, human, faerie, insects, elementals etc. Tens, maybe hundreds different types of mob, but to use spell on specific type you needed to study it first - gather it's parts and complete set. Also you could get various abilities/spells/spec items with various effects (not usual "+10000 generic stat", but like zap rods for bugs, short range teleporters etc) from finishing quests...
3. Achievement leveling, you can get achievement experience from killing named mobs, exploring areas etc. That would unlock various skill trees and give points, which could make charchter more different from everyone else.
Gear grind works, even though IMO it is boring and idiotic to do same raids for hundreds of times, but because people do it and majority doesnt complain, that is main advancment in MMORPGs nowdays.
IMO advancment should happen always as long as you play, I mean charachter like getting new skills, gaining extra attributes,not only by gear when you hit max level. Also games should encourage player advancment, real person who control charachter. Mainstream dumbed down MMORPG to level where monkey could play it (WoW is best example), like making dungeons only available at certains levels (example: 10-12, 25-26 etc), when you enter raid dungeon it would change randomly so it would be challenging at least few more times. If they would do so even those boring gear raid grinds would be a lot more interesting....
So in my opinion games shouldnt have "end game" as it is nowdays. You should always have at least few possible ways to advance, slowly bit by bit. Thats why I choose skill based games, as pure leveling advancment system is nice if you want to "read" story like WoW...
I agree with you there. But MMOs should be and is a translation of pen and paper RPG games to a computer in a massive scale. The problem is that after M59 and UO everyone forgot that and never went back and looked on the basics again.
MMOs needs to become more like real RPG games, not like FPS games. The devs should try to go back to basics as well as keeping what makes a MMO a MMO.
MMOFPS games are fine but those should really more evolve from FPS games instead.
You actually illustrate the problem, however untintentional.
To YOU, mmorpgs are about the journey. You have set in your mind what they should be about, and want everyone else to just accept it and fall in to line.