Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
What ever happend to camping for xp?
This discussion has been closed.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
When I was younger, all the friends I made in game were made while participating in [x] activities.
I have not been able to find the same types of friends or communities in games without [x] activities
I have gone back to progression servers in my original game, when they start new ones, and still have the same experience with [x] activities.
I just wish EQ had better graphics and the tradeskill system from EQ2.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
I certainly appreciate the discussion and value your viewpoint.
However I must disagree. As you say, "if its viable to solo it trivializes the game." This, in many ways, has been true for the last 10 years worth of more solo-friendly MMORPGs.
But it doesn't have to be.
Soloing content meant for a group is often a more challenging, and competitive task. There is an entire sub-culture in WoW, for example, competing and swapping strategies etc. on clearing content solo that is supposed to be done in a group.
Are these people "earning" high-end raid gear, the best in slot items to push the newest tier of content? Nope! Not even close. But the reward is often not a series of colored pixels that grant your character slightly higher stats.
There is an entire subset of MMO players whose idea of "progression" is leveling and releveling toons over and over... like having one of every class.. or 10 of every class!
Others who view "progression" as hunting for rare achievements or pets, or even cosmetic items and titles etc.
I think the average MMO player who is focused on traditional gear progression and the elitism of raiding is far, far too concerned with what other people are doing - as if other's success or failure somehow invalidates their own.
I used to be one of these types - hardcore raider, competing for "best geared X on server" and "first guild to clear Y" and yes, I did look down on players who didn't raid, or guilds who couldn't breeze through the content we were farming.
In some ways, I still feel that way sometimes... like in Destiny, I see people who don't have three level 32 characters with fully maxed out 331 legendaries and exotics etc. and I think - man, I'm so much better than them.
And I am pretty darn good at the game, this week in Iron Banner is proving that!
But at the same time, I stop and realize - yeah, I'm pretty good... but I probably just play a LOT more than they do.
TL;DR
It'd be hard for someone like to me to sign off on a game where a solo player could achieve the same level of success as I could in a group... but if the solo player had a tougher time getting there, or a comparably challenging route etc. then I think I'd get over it.
I'll always prefer to play with others vs. solo. Not the biggest fan of PUGs, as I am kind of an elitist and don't have the patience for players who don't give it their all. But playing with friends and guild mates is what makes these games so special and unique in the gaming market.
Doesn't mean everyone else feels that way too.
All things equal, a variety of tasks will always require more thinking than an endlessly repetitive task. So if you rate quest-based games "fairly mindless" then we'd have to agree that mob-grind games are "entirely mindless".
If you want to criticize the difficulty of questing, then that's entirely justified since it would clearly be better with some form of difficulty slider where players have more control over the challenges they face (and are rewarded with a superior rate of progress for tackling harder challenges.) That seems to be your actual criticism, and questing actually demands more thinking than an endless grind (and if challenge is what you seek, then presumably you'd want more thinking to be involved, not less.)
Choice still exists in quest games. Even in the tightest linear paths of WOW (WoD's one-zone-per-level zones) there is choice in what quest hubs you hop between. When done more non-linearly, there's even more choice.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Optimizing PC games for consoles is kinda like outfitting your car for a bike trail.
The mob is artificial, and the rules he's playing by are artificial, but the difficulty is real. Difficulty measures the amount of skill required to beat an encounter, and that difficulty obviously increases if the mob's HP/DMG increase. Acceptable mistakes decrease, and if you don't play skillfully you'll lose against a mob whose HP/DMG is high enough.
Solo viability doesn't trivialize the game, and doesn't even speak to whether group challenges actually require more skill. A solo mob can require the player performs their rotation with 90% perfection, and that requires more skill individually than the group mob balanced to be beatable if the DPSers each perform their rotation at 60%.
It's fine for a game to offer tightly-tuned solo challenges. It's desirable even.
It's suicidal for a game to only offer tightly-tuned solo challenges. This makes the game impossible for less skilled players to play.
It's even more suicidal to only offer tightly-tuned group challenges. Not only is it too difficult for the average player, but it clearly conflicts with the way players want to have fun in games. It's fine for group challenges to be offered alongside solo ones, and even fine for the group rewards to be somewhat better (especially relative to the amount of difficulty beaten) but game design has been around for enough decades as a discipline for us to understand that forcing players into the wrong challenges and the wrong types of gameplay is not how you create a successful game. Unless Pantheon is going to make it incredibly easy to queue up and teleport into a group,
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I wouldn't say that mob grind is mindless. Especially in an open world.
The mob grinding itself may be a bit mindless. Of course it's not entirely so if the difficulty of the mob is high and the risk of death is high.
The other thing you have to take into account is even though you might have variety in quests you can have the same variety in a non quest/GPS game without the restrictions of following a specific path. You could easily go off and hunt deer for their skins. Then you could bring them back to town and find an NPC who has tools and possible recipes for tanning the skin and making leather armor. You might go out and mine some ore from some rocks and bring them back to town. As you mentioned you could go farming somewhere in some random place that looks good for doing so. The big difference is you are not following a GPS around. You are discovering things for yourself and making choices for yourself.
Perhaps it is a bit unfair to compare only grinding mobs in these games as there was much more to do then that. Most of it was based on community. There was faction mob grind, grinding mobs for crafting, grinding mobs for keys, grinding mobs for specific items, etc. You would grind in a different way depending on the makeup of your group. You might grind as the trinity. You might grind solo for which each class that could had a unique way of doing it. You might combine a few unique class abilities to take down mobs. Grinding was a big part of old games, but it had a purpose and not all old games were about grinding mobs. Some were about grinding to build a house or grinding to chop wood from trees. It is not so cut and paste like everyone goes out and grinds the same way and on the same things.
On the flip side everyone grinds the same way on quests because quests follow a specific path in most games these days. In the old days quests did not follow a specific path or order in games that had them. You might go talk find the local gossip by talking to various people in town or at a pub. You would receive various tips on troubles happening at different locations. You would then proceed to go out and try to locate said places. That is not really how questing works now.
Well said, both of you.
The games with camping and group-centric content were just fundamentally different. A casual solo MMO isn't compatible with the group heavy and mob camp type of gameplay because it all hinges on the game providing an adequate challenge in general. If everywhere you go you need other players, then you will get used to slowing down and being more sociable because your ability to progress in the game depends on it. Camping isn't the x factor, its the challenge that yields the social aspects and need for players to come together in an activity like camping.
I've gone hunting in MMOs and in real life. Neither is anything like camping, which is sitting on a hill and fighting the same three or four magically re-appearing mobs over and over again. Id real life hunting was anything like MMO hunting, I would have switched from 223s to grenades long ago.
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
Amen. Hunting in an MMO means going out to kill wolves for hides so you can make leather armor, or sell them for money. This is alive and well in LotRO, where you could possibly be working on a slayer deed, to boot.
Sitting next to a spawn point with auto tab-attack queued is something else entirely.
The overall difficulty is always driven more by the tuning of the challenges in the world. But all things equal, endless-grind games are more mindless than questing games because they require less variety.
Requiring a certain amount of variety doesn't prevent a player in WOW from doing nearly all the things you mention. You can skin, you can mine, you can craft, you can group. My fastest leveled characters in WOW grouped from the moment LFD was enabled to the moment they capped out (except for a brief bit around level 60 where new DK tanks caused my queue to not be instant, so I stepped out into outlands a little in between queues, until around ~63 when the queue normalized again.)
So again, if your concern is difficulty or balance then focus on those elements. Just don't try to pretend the amount of variety in a game where you can literally sit in one spot grinding forever is anything close to what you experience in a quest-based game where the game demands variety. Only in the worst quest-based games do they fail to offer variety (and honestly I'm surprised there aren't more games failing to implement quests with good variety, since we've seen several games fail to implement varied mob abilities (TOR, WAR, etc) and it's kind of a similarly easy failure to make.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I still think you don't understand that there is no variety for questing in MMOs. I don't want to keep repeating myself, but it's basically just following a string around until the game is done. I've played through WoW recently and the game took me quickly from zone to zone. Most of the quests were the same, but even if they were a little different you could see through the game mechanics easily. The only way for true variety is to take the game off it's set path and allow players to go out and do what they want.
In terms of being able to sit in one spot that is a choice you have. It's variety. You can sit in one spot or your can continuously be on the move. It's up to you. Variety is about choice. Linear quests are more about forcing you along a set path of easy events. Even if the events were not easy they would still be forcing everyone into to doing almost exactly the same thing in the quest portion of the game.
So many people that have commented on this sound like old folks trying to convince kids how much fun it is to use a manual lawn mower instead of a riding lawnmower because it is "fun" and builds character.
I think MMOs are just as social or more so than they have ever been, but now it is on the player to be social and not forced. I didn't find spawn camping with random groups that much more social than fill ins on randoms. Well that is, when you actually bother to take time to converse.
It is true though, with less downtimes there is certainly less chat time, unless you make the time to chat.
Help support an artist and gamer who has lost his tools to create and play: http://www.gofundme.com/u63nzcgk
They simply aren't as social as they used to be, don't know how anyone can say they are~. I prefer using a manual mower though so what do I know, it is more relaxing and you don't have to worry about running things over. Only reason to use a riding mower is if you have a lawn so big that a manual mower just doesn't make sense.
They might've meant the real manual mowers... the wheel driven ones without engines.
more like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle
or this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythe
Yep, I should have said manual mower over a power mower. I meant the old grindy, horrible ones.
Help support an artist and gamer who has lost his tools to create and play: http://www.gofundme.com/u63nzcgk
As a teenager I earned my spending money mowing yards with a push mower. One with an engine. It was fun and helped me build a strong work ethic. I EARNED my spending money.
As an adult, I purchased a push mower, one without an engine. Yard work is something I enjoy, it gets me outdoors doing something more constructive than killing pixels.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
And the ultimate in automatic lawn mowers? The horse.
I also earned my spending money mowing yards but I did it with a riding lawn mower. It was quite fun and I EARNED every bit of that spending money. The work ethic is still very strong in me.
We're still doing the camping thing in PoTBS. Groups of us form up to "fleet" an area, either to build up unrest to create a PvP zone, or to get drops, or just to help lower level players level up. We're still asking if low-level players want to join our "camp".
It is still a lot of fun, even after all these years.
------------
2024: 47 years on the Net.
There's nothing wrong with that, IMO. People did it in High Hold Keep back in the day in EQ, Nagafen's Lair, etc. There is limited space. I mean, how else are you supposed to accommodate many players XPing in non-instanced zones that won't completely kill the immersion and force people to ignore each other, for the most part. It's not like you were limited to the best spots - there were other GOOD spots available. Other people did go to other spots and group up, and level at decent paces.
Nowadays you camp in your own instance, with no other people but your group and it's done in 20 minutes or less. You barely got to know anyone, while you chatted in global channels (if the instances aren't run on a different server that makes it impossible for you to even communicate in those channels while you're in them). Even then, it's not camping. Look at GW2, you basically skip as much content as possible to get to the objective an get the end reward.
Vanguard was kind of similar to EQ in that respect, but we know how that turned out. Always sucks when a great idea is ruined by shoddy development... :-(
When Grinding MOBs levels your character at 1/25th the rate of Quests. It's the only way to level at any rage considered decent even to a very casual player in most modern MMORPG games. The disparity in leveling speed is too great to even consider yourself having a choice.
Also, the XP MOBs get in overland zones are largely balanced for solo players in most of these games, and even then, it would take you something like 40 minutes, for example, to grind the amount of XP you could get from one solo quest in WoW. There is just no comparison.
Those games give XP for MOB kills only for the reason that it would make literally no sense to not at least give *something*.
EQ2 still allows camping for XP, however its quests still give big XP and by the time you're camping anything you're only doing it for AA (assuming you didn't grind Chelsith or some other zone at a lower level, or didn't PL them in record time with an SK or something - not sure what places they nerfed in latter expansions/updates) and drops, not XP for levels, because you're max level by the time anyone would bother taking you there.
We established, rather conclusively, how questing provides more variety in the most meaningful way (what you're doing.)
I've described the details that cause quest-based games to be more varied. You appear to be deliberately zooming out as far as you can, so you can no longer see the details, and summing things up as "following a string". You're deliberately trying to view things from far enough away that those inconveniently real details are blurry. Except that when players play games, they're playing them up close: moment-to-moment players notice these differences. It actually is varied gameplay.
To make matters worse, even at that zoom level grind-based games don't fare any better since we can sum things up as "grinding mobs" (we don't even have to be abstract about it by using some string analogy, since you're literally only doing one thing, so even when you zoom out the lack of variety is still apparent.)
So the variety angle is utterly hopeless. Quests provide lots of variety. Mob-grind doesn't. In fact mob-grind passively encourages players not to seek variety. And the only variety that exists in mob-grind is the least meaningful form of variety (what you see), and that bit of variety is also present in quest-based games.
So drop the variety angle and pursue some actual criticism instead.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Because, while grinding is a fun way to play socially the Korean games take it way too far. Look at Lineage II. Seriously, months to get through half the levels. I don't want instant max level characters. I don't mind leveling for 4-5 months... But with the increasing level caps, ridiculous inflated XP tables at certain breakpoints (2billion XP for a level when MOBs in solo zones were giving us like 13k XP - you do the math) just makes it unbearable.
You gain a level, and suddenly level 79 is 5x as much XP required at level 78, etc. but you're still killing MOBs that give XP comparable to (in some cases lower than) MOBs in level 50's zones (except you can't XP there due to the XP penalty for them being too low level).
Now the MOBs give more XP, but the XP tables are set up in such a way that it's still absolutely ridiculous...
Except if you load up on tons of XP Runes and Potions/Vitality Replenish or Maintenance from their L2Store, at which point the game has a monthly cost comparable to 3-4 WoW subscriptions, if not significantly more.
Yes, Grinding is fun, but the Korean companies take it way too far because the internet culture there just isn't the same as it is here (Internet Cafe's where people pay for PlayTime, etc. are more common there than in the US, so there is incentive to lengthen the grinding to amazingly dumb levels - economically speaking).