The Ideal Game

Apoch01 · January 2015

What I want to see in a game.... and more importantly would pay for.

I apologize for the length, and if you don’t read it that’s fine... this is more of a cathartic release of my current frustrations than a rally cry anyway. It's biased based on my experiences with MMOs which covers most of the mainstream ones over the past decade and a half.

Billing System.

Put up that paywall... Releases and Expansions that provide me with 12 to 18 months of potential new content, I am more than willing to pay the $60.00 along with the $15.00 sub fee.

Honestly that is the biggest way to maintain the community. Have your newbie zones, and your F2P intros, all well and good in the name of marketing and exposure, but for the community as a whole ... Paywall please. Not to be harsh but if you can’t afford the $15.00 fee, then your priorities should lead you away from MMO gaming as they can be a counterproductive escapism for far too many.

Cash Shops are great, but let’s limit them to vanity items, or optional downloadable content, for those old enough to remember pen and paper games, the "module" as a prepackaged instance for a nominal fee... great way to trickle in incremental development. Game impacting services, XP boosts, Level Boosts, race/class changes... all kill immersion and cheapen the experience. Totally self-defeating for the game, make all the content relevant and you won’t have to worry about these types of money grabs.

Get rid of the concept of the global auction house, at least beyond the basic crafting materials and rudimentary items. (cut it off at “uncommon”) Force players to interact to move goods of any value. Gold farmers, griefers, botters, all are centered around this concept. You wouldn’t be able to buy Excalibur by joining an auction in the corner of Camelot, why should you be able to do it with Epics in game? “Winning” should be the game play experience, not the item du jour… Yes, I enjoy the tiny dopamine burst when I get an upgrade, and it makes me want to jump back on the hamster wheel, but a winning game changes the dialog from “look at my shiny new widget” to “man, we just had to take down this crazy wizard, and he dropped this shiny new widget”

Artwork

Cartoony vs Realistic... how is this even a topic, and only a topic for the MMO genre? Please fire all art directors who are currently employed and who use this tactic as a way to swing the pendulum from one extreme to another. "Realistic can’t be done well” or “I don’t want to play cartoon time". Has anyone looked at the graphics for FPS, or ARPG games...? I don’t think anyone is going to complain if a games graphics compare to Call of Duty, Diablo 3, Assassin's Creed, etc... This one has always baffled me.

Game Play

This is where I think the industry has gone so far astray... Make the "group" (4-6 man content) the core of the game. Yes, there have to be solo elements, yes there have to be end-game raid content, but the bread and butter should be the group experience.

Zone irrelevance is the one item I cannot believe has not been solved this far into the genre. It’s not difficult at all. It's a very simple effort to scale the characters functional level to that of the zone and scale the rewards accordingly. You should be able to revisit locations at any time and get rewards that are on part with your current level, but you should not be able to go back and repeatedly farm them. Play them with a little more ease, but the rewards are scaled back, that is perfectly fine... but at any point in the game if you pull too many or get too stupid, you die... lesson learned

Roles and Archetypes… please stop trying to balance everything, give me a compelling role for my class and how it interacts with the environment and other players. Make them all count, crowd control has to count, buffers and de-buffers have to count... Zerg in AoE spamming tactics need to fail every time, and repeated zergs need to repeatedly fail. Pet classes and charm classes are great ways to play, make them different, rich and meaningful.

Stop the bloat, no one in the world needs to or wants to manage 60 skills at one time. Button mashing 18 click rotations are not fun. They give the theory crafters a great time in coming up with the "optimum" in their workbooks and spreadsheets, and they look great on a dps meter... but really the act of actually playing them is not fun... A complex list of abilities, skills, and spells that complement each other is fantastic and enriching, but let’s have the option to develop some and ignore others to round out our characters, instead of multiple build sets, let’s have the ability to mix and match which ones are active. I would love to see an improvement on the Old EQ1 spell book vs active spells approach as opposed to the EQ2 here are 60 spells that are always active and 48 of them are meaningless approach...

Stop with the telegraphed mechanics complete with shaded areas to step out of, the reticule targeting, the rest of flash in the pan fad driven changes that have been thrust upon us with “next generation MMO” gaming. If you want to make combat more enjoyable make the skills meaningful, have them compliment or counter each other… make successful combat more about controlling the encounter than twitch gaming and button mashing the AoE.

Story Line

Once and for all, stop... stop trying to give us a story and make our characters bit players with <insert name here> dialogs. The games that make us bond with our characters are ones where we write the script. So tired of the popup book, spoon fed, hollowness that is in games today.

Make factions plentiful and meaningful with complex interactions. How our characters interact with those factions IS the story. If my Dwarf wants to shun the mountains and mines and embrace the trees and the woods, that should be his journey complete with the repercussions with his homeland. If my slightly disturbed mage has to step away from the arcane principals and paves his way by working as a paid assassin... that is one hell of a story, don’t take that away from me because you want the formulaic good vs evil, alliance vs hoard, Freeport vs Qenos drivel you force on me today.

So many more topics to address; crafting, gathering, PVP, travel, class diversity, racial abilities, the list goes on and on… maybe one day when the mood hits.

Pepeq · January 2015

Originally posted by Apoch01
What I want to see in a game.... and more importantly would pay for.

I apologize for the length, and if you don’t read it that’s fine... this is more of a cathartic release of my current frustrations than a rally cry anyway. It's biased based on my experiences with MMOs which covers most of the mainstream ones over the past decade and a half.

Billing System.

Put up that paywall... Releases and Expansions that provide me with 12 to 18 months of potential new content, I am more than willing to pay the $60.00 along with the $15.00 sub fee.

Honestly that is the biggest way to maintain the community. Have your newbie zones, and your F2P intros, all well and good in the name of marketing and exposure, but for the community as a whole ... Paywall please. Not to be harsh but if you can’t afford the $15.00 fee, then your priorities should lead you away from MMO gaming as they can be a counterproductive escapism for far too many.

Cash Shops are great, but let’s limit them to vanity items, or optional downloadable content, for those old enough to remember pen and paper games, the "module" as a prepackaged instance for a nominal fee... great way to trickle in incremental development. Game impacting services, XP boosts, Level Boosts, race/class changes... all kill immersion and cheapen the experience. Totally self-defeating for the game, make all the content relevant and you won’t have to worry about these types of money grabs.

Get rid of the concept of the global auction house, at least beyond the basic crafting materials and rudimentary items. (cut it off at “uncommon”) Force players to interact to move goods of any value. Gold farmers, griefers, botters, all are centered around this concept.   You wouldn’t be able to buy Excalibur by joining an auction in the corner of Camelot, why should you be able to do it with Epics in game? “Winning” should be the game play experience, not the item du jour… Yes, I enjoy the tiny dopamine burst when I get an upgrade, and it makes me want to jump back on the hamster wheel, but a winning game changes the dialog from “look at my shiny new widget” to “man, we just had to take down this crazy wizard, and he dropped this shiny new widget”

Artwork

Cartoony vs Realistic... how is this even a topic, and only a topic for the MMO genre? Please fire all art directors who are currently employed and who use this tactic as a way to swing the pendulum from one extreme to another.   "Realistic can’t be done well” or “I don’t want to play cartoon time".   Has anyone looked at the graphics for FPS, or ARPG games...? I don’t think anyone is going to complain if a games graphics compare to Call of Duty, Diablo 3, Assassin's Creed, etc... This one has always baffled me.

Game Play

This is where I think the industry has gone so far astray... Make the "group" (4-6 man content) the core of the game. Yes, there have to be solo elements, yes there have to be end-game raid content, but the bread and butter should be the group experience.

Zone irrelevance is the one item I cannot believe has not been solved this far into the genre. It’s not difficult at all. It's a very simple effort to scale the characters functional level to that of the zone and scale the rewards accordingly. You should be able to revisit locations at any time and get rewards that are on part with your current level, but you should not be able to go back and repeatedly farm them.    Play them with a little more ease, but the rewards are scaled back, that is perfectly fine... but at any point in the game if you pull too many or get too stupid, you die... lesson learned

Roles and Archetypes… please stop trying to balance everything, give me a compelling role for my class and how it interacts with the environment and other players. Make them all count, crowd control has to count, buffers and de-buffers have to count... Zerg in AoE spamming tactics need to fail every time, and repeated zergs need to repeatedly fail. Pet classes and charm classes are great ways to play, make them different, rich and meaningful.

Stop the bloat, no one in the world needs to or wants to manage 60 skills at one time. Button mashing 18 click rotations are not fun. They give the theory crafters a great time in coming up with the "optimum" in their workbooks and spreadsheets, and they look great on a dps meter... but really the act of actually playing them is not fun... A complex list of abilities, skills, and spells that complement each other is fantastic and enriching, but let’s have the option to develop some and ignore others to round out our characters, instead of multiple build sets, let’s have the ability to mix and match which ones are active. I would love to see an improvement on the Old EQ1 spell book vs active spells approach as opposed to the EQ2 here are 60 spells that are always active and 48 of them are meaningless approach...

Stop with the telegraphed mechanics complete with shaded areas to step out of, the reticule targeting, the rest of flash in the pan fad driven changes that have been thrust upon us with “next generation MMO” gaming. If you want to make combat more enjoyable make the skills meaningful, have them compliment or counter each other… make successful combat more about controlling the encounter than twitch gaming and button mashing the AoE.

Story Line

Once and for all, stop... stop trying to give us a story and make our characters bit players with dialogs. The games that make us bond with our characters are ones where we write the script. So tired of the popup book, spoon fed, hollowness that is in games today.

Make factions plentiful and meaningful with complex interactions. How our characters interact with those factions IS the story. If my Dwarf wants to shun the mountains and mines and embrace the trees and the woods, that should be his journey complete with the repercussions with his homeland. If my slightly disturbed mage has to step away from the arcane principals and paves his way by working as a paid assassin... that is one hell of a story, don’t take that away from me because you want the formulaic good vs evil, alliance vs hoard, Freeport vs Qenos drivel you force on me today.

So many more topics to address; crafting, gathering, PVP, travel, class diversity, racial abilities, the list goes on and on… maybe one day when the mood hits.

Pepeq · January 2015

Originally posted by Pepeq
Originally posted by Apoch01
What I want to see in a game.... and more importantly would pay for.

I apologize for the length, and if you don’t read it that’s fine... this is more of a cathartic release of my current frustrations than a rally cry anyway. It's biased based on my experiences with MMOs which covers most of the mainstream ones over the past decade and a half.

Billing System.

Put up that paywall... Releases and Expansions that provide me with 12 to 18 months of potential new content, I am more than willing to pay the $60.00 along with the $15.00 sub fee.

Honestly that is the biggest way to maintain the community. Have your newbie zones, and your F2P intros, all well and good in the name of marketing and exposure, but for the community as a whole ... Paywall please. Not to be harsh but if you can’t afford the $15.00 fee, then your priorities should lead you away from MMO gaming as they can be a counterproductive escapism for far too many.

Cash Shops are great, but let’s limit them to vanity items, or optional downloadable content, for those old enough to remember pen and paper games, the "module" as a prepackaged instance for a nominal fee... great way to trickle in incremental development. Game impacting services, XP boosts, Level Boosts, race/class changes... all kill immersion and cheapen the experience. Totally self-defeating for the game, make all the content relevant and you won’t have to worry about these types of money grabs.

Get rid of the concept of the global auction house, at least beyond the basic crafting materials and rudimentary items. (cut it off at “uncommon”) Force players to interact to move goods of any value. Gold farmers, griefers, botters, all are centered around this concept.   You wouldn’t be able to buy Excalibur by joining an auction in the corner of Camelot, why should you be able to do it with Epics in game? “Winning” should be the game play experience, not the item du jour… Yes, I enjoy the tiny dopamine burst when I get an upgrade, and it makes me want to jump back on the hamster wheel, but a winning game changes the dialog from “look at my shiny new widget” to “man, we just had to take down this crazy wizard, and he dropped this shiny new widget”

Artwork

Cartoony vs Realistic... how is this even a topic, and only a topic for the MMO genre? Please fire all art directors who are currently employed and who use this tactic as a way to swing the pendulum from one extreme to another.   "Realistic can’t be done well” or “I don’t want to play cartoon time".   Has anyone looked at the graphics for FPS, or ARPG games...? I don’t think anyone is going to complain if a games graphics compare to Call of Duty, Diablo 3, Assassin's Creed, etc... This one has always baffled me.

Game Play

This is where I think the industry has gone so far astray... Make the "group" (4-6 man content) the core of the game. Yes, there have to be solo elements, yes there have to be end-game raid content, but the bread and butter should be the group experience.

Zone irrelevance is the one item I cannot believe has not been solved this far into the genre. It’s not difficult at all. It's a very simple effort to scale the characters functional level to that of the zone and scale the rewards accordingly. You should be able to revisit locations at any time and get rewards that are on part with your current level, but you should not be able to go back and repeatedly farm them.    Play them with a little more ease, but the rewards are scaled back, that is perfectly fine... but at any point in the game if you pull too many or get too stupid, you die... lesson learned

Roles and Archetypes… please stop trying to balance everything, give me a compelling role for my class and how it interacts with the environment and other players. Make them all count, crowd control has to count, buffers and de-buffers have to count... Zerg in AoE spamming tactics need to fail every time, and repeated zergs need to repeatedly fail. Pet classes and charm classes are great ways to play, make them different, rich and meaningful.

Stop the bloat, no one in the world needs to or wants to manage 60 skills at one time. Button mashing 18 click rotations are not fun. They give the theory crafters a great time in coming up with the "optimum" in their workbooks and spreadsheets, and they look great on a dps meter... but really the act of actually playing them is not fun... A complex list of abilities, skills, and spells that complement each other is fantastic and enriching, but let’s have the option to develop some and ignore others to round out our characters, instead of multiple build sets, let’s have the ability to mix and match which ones are active. I would love to see an improvement on the Old EQ1 spell book vs active spells approach as opposed to the EQ2 here are 60 spells that are always active and 48 of them are meaningless approach...

Stop with the telegraphed mechanics complete with shaded areas to step out of, the reticule targeting, the rest of flash in the pan fad driven changes that have been thrust upon us with “next generation MMO” gaming. If you want to make combat more enjoyable make the skills meaningful, have them compliment or counter each other… make successful combat more about controlling the encounter than twitch gaming and button mashing the AoE.

Story Line

Once and for all, stop... stop trying to give us a story and make our characters bit players with dialogs. The games that make us bond with our characters are ones where we write the script. So tired of the popup book, spoon fed, hollowness that is in games today.

Make factions plentiful and meaningful with complex interactions. How our characters interact with those factions IS the story. If my Dwarf wants to shun the mountains and mines and embrace the trees and the woods, that should be his journey complete with the repercussions with his homeland. If my slightly disturbed mage has to step away from the arcane principals and paves his way by working as a paid assassin... that is one hell of a story, don’t take that away from me because you want the formulaic good vs evil, alliance vs hoard, Freeport vs Qenos drivel you force on me today.

So many more topics to address; crafting, gathering, PVP, travel, class diversity, racial abilities, the list goes on and on… maybe one day when the mood hits.

The only way you are going to get that much content is if they make it exceedingly slow to do stuff, otherwise you will blow through it in a nanosecond.

Consider for a moment that it takes them years to produce the content you complete in a day and you will understand why what you ask for can't be done without a gating system... and everyone pretty much hates gating systems.

CrazKanuk · January 2015

Originally posted by Apoch01
What I want to see in a game.... and more importantly would pay for.

I apologize for the length, and if you don’t read it that’s fine... this is more of a cathartic release of my current frustrations than a rally cry anyway. It's biased based on my experiences with MMOs which covers most of the mainstream ones over the past decade and a half.

Billing System.

Put up that paywall... Releases and Expansions that provide me with 12 to 18 months of potential new content, I am more than willing to pay the $60.00 along with the $15.00 sub fee.

Honestly that is the biggest way to maintain the community. Have your newbie zones, and your F2P intros, all well and good in the name of marketing and exposure, but for the community as a whole ... Paywall please. Not to be harsh but if you can’t afford the $15.00 fee, then your priorities should lead you away from MMO gaming as they can be a counterproductive escapism for far too many.

Zero MMORPGs, EVER, have provided 12-18 months of gameplay.

Cash Shops are great, but let’s limit them to vanity items, or optional downloadable content, for those old enough to remember pen and paper games, the "module" as a prepackaged instance for a nominal fee... great way to trickle in incremental development. Game impacting services, XP boosts, Level Boosts, race/class changes... all kill immersion and cheapen the experience. Totally self-defeating for the game, make all the content relevant and you won’t have to worry about these types of money grabs.

Are you really so concerned about how others are playing the game that it impacts your own enjoyment of the game? If so, that's just sad. If you aren't the one buying these services, then how is it killing immersion or cheapening your gaming experience?

Get rid of the concept of the global auction house, at least beyond the basic crafting materials and rudimentary items. (cut it off at “uncommon”) Force players to interact to move goods of any value. Gold farmers, griefers, botters, all are centered around this concept.   You wouldn’t be able to buy Excalibur by joining an auction in the corner of Camelot, why should you be able to do it with Epics in game? “Winning” should be the game play experience, not the item du jour… Yes, I enjoy the tiny dopamine burst when I get an upgrade, and it makes me want to jump back on the hamster wheel, but a winning game changes the dialog from “look at my shiny new widget” to “man, we just had to take down this crazy wizard, and he dropped this shiny new widget”

Artwork

Cartoony vs Realistic... how is this even a topic, and only a topic for the MMO genre? Please fire all art directors who are currently employed and who use this tactic as a way to swing the pendulum from one extreme to another.   "Realistic can’t be done well” or “I don’t want to play cartoon time".   Has anyone looked at the graphics for FPS, or ARPG games...? I don’t think anyone is going to complain if a games graphics compare to Call of Duty, Diablo 3, Assassin's Creed, etc... This one has always baffled me.

Ok, so to remove the baffling, MMOs are designed to cater to as wide an audience as possible. Reason being, they are already service a small enough niche without having to cut that down even further. Take a look at the specs for the new Witcher game. If you package that as an MMO, you will have very few sales. Now, if you look at something like ESO, you can crank the graphics up pretty high, but if you want to optimize performance, you usually turn it down, at least to medium or high. Oh, and FYI, animations of photo-realistic games are horrible. Strap a beard to your character in DA: I and tell me that looks realistic.

Game Play

This is where I think the industry has gone so far astray... Make the "group" (4-6 man content) the core of the game. Yes, there have to be solo elements, yes there have to be end-game raid content, but the bread and butter should be the group experience.

This is great, as long as you're somehow able to make starting area content compelling or important enough that higher-level characters will come back there. Otherwise, you get vacant starting areas where new players can't progress.

Zone irrelevance is the one item I cannot believe has not been solved this far into the genre. It’s not difficult at all. It's a very simple effort to scale the characters functional level to that of the zone and scale the rewards accordingly. You should be able to revisit locations at any time and get rewards that are on part with your current level, but you should not be able to go back and repeatedly farm them.    Play them with a little more ease, but the rewards are scaled back, that is perfectly fine... but at any point in the game if you pull too many or get too stupid, you die... lesson learned

Firefall actually did a pretty good job of this in Beta.

Roles and Archetypes… please stop trying to balance everything, give me a compelling role for my class and how it interacts with the environment and other players. Make them all count, crowd control has to count, buffers and de-buffers have to count... Zerg in AoE spamming tactics need to fail every time, and repeated zergs need to repeatedly fail. Pet classes and charm classes are great ways to play, make them different, rich and meaningful.

It's not about making it all count. If there is an imbalance in class roles, then you basically end up with a server full of Mages, for instance, because they deal 50% more DPS and have much more CC than any other class.

Zerg tactics do fail every time if you're organized. Actually, Zergs are generally mis-classified. It' generally an organized group of players versus a horde of really poorly organized players that causes them to yell Zerg! Then the mindless attackees simply respawn and run directly back to the organized group, like shooting fish in a barrel. Sorry, that's not a zerg at all, too much brains.

Stop the bloat, no one in the world needs to or wants to manage 60 skills at one time. Button mashing 18 click rotations are not fun. They give the theory crafters a great time in coming up with the "optimum" in their workbooks and spreadsheets, and they look great on a dps meter... but really the act of actually playing them is not fun... A complex list of abilities, skills, and spells that complement each other is fantastic and enriching, but let’s have the option to develop some and ignore others to round out our characters, instead of multiple build sets, let’s have the ability to mix and match which ones are active. I would love to see an improvement on the Old EQ1 spell book vs active spells approach as opposed to the EQ2 here are 60 spells that are always active and 48 of them are meaningless approach...

Agree

Stop with the telegraphed mechanics complete with shaded areas to step out of, the reticule targeting, the rest of flash in the pan fad driven changes that have been thrust upon us with “next generation MMO” gaming. If you want to make combat more enjoyable make the skills meaningful, have them compliment or counter each other… make successful combat more about controlling the encounter than twitch gaming and button mashing the AoE.

There's a lot of people still skeptical of telegraphs, but why? I've said since telegraphs were released for Wildstar that telegraphs offer the ability to amplify difficulty exponentially, and I was right. I still don't think that people recognize who encounters can be randomized much more effectively using telegraphs, but every single raid encounter you've ever done is likely to have telegraphs, anyway. There are rules surrounding each encounter, in any MMORPG, so how is that any different from a telegraph?

Apoch01 · January 2015

Thanks for the replies guys,

A couple points i did not articulate very clearly, on my first post.

First the "12-18 month content" that was more to illustrate that i do not have a problem paying for an expansion every 12-18 months. I think several of the games do a decent job of scheduling expansions on a macro release and then do iterative updates to build upon them. Sprinkle in the additional ability of downloadable content packs or user generated content to augment those expansions and i think there is a profitable road map for revenue for the retail / sub model for a game with quality content vs the F2P Cash shop only. F2P to me seems to be a desperation grab after the content / quality itself failed.

The artwork as far as appealing to masses, i still don't fully grasp as the FPS and ARPG games dont seem to have the same debates, and run on the same platforms. Actually in most cases the FPS in particular have alot more physics and frame rate dependencies than MMOs. Again just an overall ponder around the passions with the topic.

Lastly, the telegraphs i did a poor job of framing out the context. I dont mind as much on the raid or multi group encounters, particularly those with a scripted mechanic. but many games lately add them to every encounter. ESO as one example but its very common in most games in the past 3 years or so.

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