Would getting bored or distracted be considered a mental challenge?
Solitary confinement in the dark for long periods of time can be a challenge, that is all mental.
Or am I way off on this?
Again, only skill gives a challenge meaning.
You can consider it a challenge. You can excitedly celebrate how you went on a long trip and beat the challenge of boredom! Those near you will look at you strangely, because you won't have actually done anything meaningful -- you won't have done anything worth celebrating.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I guess landing on the moon wasn't a challenge either. Like, big deal and they were sitting down inside the rocket the whole time.
My posts haven't been very long, and nearly all of them have focused on skill as the difference between meaningful and meaningless challenge. Are you trying to imply you thought it took no skills to develop, produce, and fly a rocket to land on the moon? None at all?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Originally posted by Bladestrom Ah wait that's not right, it's more like 1 hour walking through beautiful countryside followed by 49 hours walking on a treadmill > 49 hours walking through beautiful countryside followed by 1 hour on a treadmill. Perfect
Yep. Anyone know what the starter area in Rift looks like from memory? I started beta, pushed through the first 5 zones in 10 minutes (or less), turned of the game and never went back. I've been waiting for a good MMO for a very long time.
The only thing i remember in rift was 1 of my characters out of 4, and umm that first PvP areana thing where u need to hold that crystal thing. Thats it and i played that game for a reasonable amount of time.
Now with EQ which i havant played since around 2004 or so i can literaly remember 95% of the zone names and how there connected together which zones connect to what and so on. Along with majority of the layouts and maps in my heads.
I didn't read all of this, but I feel obliged to chip in regardless. I'm certain this sentiment has been shared already.
I consider myself a "vet."
I've had a lot of fun with modern games. With solo games. With RPGs. With console games. Heck, even with card games and board games.
But absolutely nothing has ever topped that feeling of downing that raid target, for the first time, after weeks of preparation, practice, struggle and drama, with a group of 70/50/30/20... (notice the number keeps dropping as the years go by, once it got down to around 10 people or less it didn't really feel that epic any longer, at least to me).
I'll never forget a lot of my first Everquest raid kills, and there are entire expansions worth of content I could still go through and map out nearly every map and encounter, and I still lament over some of the loot that I never got to drop, and kick myself for items I passed on (or got stupidly). I still have rows of hotkeys for raids that were a decade ago - and the one hotkey I mashed every time I needed people to pay attention (this was before Vent/TS/Mumble took over all communication, and wouldn't have worked well with 50+ people anyway). I won't forget a lot of my WoW raid kills, and the work our entire guild had to do to farm up materials, crafting items, potions, food, resist gear, and repuation. I had fun with it, but I've already forgotten what I killed in ESO last weekend.
There is nothing in my gaming history that can surpass that moment of elation, and those very few moments make up for all the derp mistakes, the heartache, the drama, and a lot of other BS we put up with. If I'm entirely honest about it, there are very few moments in my life period that compare to those moments. The second, third, fifteenth kills, those weren't so much fun. The kills where you go through hopping on one foot with both arms tied behind your back to earn some achievement - not so much fun, your fighting some artificial constraint placed on the encounter, not the encounter itself. Those genuinely difficult encounters that took a lot of patience, cooperation, preparation, and just a little luck - those first kills were the best.
And nothing out there is like that any more. I keep going back to EQ over and over, and it's not the same game. WoW isn't the same it was 10 years ago.
They were extremely rare, but those moments, they were that good.
That's what I want. The content was part of it, but so were the people - and the way the game brought us all together, that's really what I want back.
Originally posted by Bladestrom Because we appreciate the journey, we are patient, we do enjoy lore and the story, we do understand immersion needs engagement, we don't get jealous if others rush ahead, we know that it madness to rush through content that took years to develop to get to end game where content runs out. Starter for 10
Originally posted by Bladestrom Because we appreciate the journey, we are patient, we do enjoy lore and the story, we do understand immersion needs engagement, we don't get jealous if others rush ahead, we know that it madness to rush through content that took years to develop to get to end game where content runs out. Starter for 10
THIS ... This is exactly correct
Gamers these days think a dungeon is anything less than a fox-hole but longer than their socks
Many of us grew up on PnP games, we are USED to dungeons that run all week and if anything like the bunch i knew, the DM created his own world, own adventures for us to laugh at the thief in (tbh, he deserved every death) not the stuff you bought and run in a night.
MMO's once had huge ass quests, dungeon's which took ages and we enjoyed it, we understood that an mmo was a game genre you put TIME into to get places. Not the watered down stuff they give out these days, if you liked the niche and had the time, you played, if you didn't have time you logged on when you did and everyone understood.
Not 'oh i have 30 mins, this game takes too long, smaller dungeons, more rest xp so i can keep up with those who have the time'
If you don't have the time the games used to require, tbh you shouldn't be playing the genre
Originally posted by Bladestrom Ah wait that's not right, it's more like 1 hour walking through beautiful countryside followed by 49 hours walking on a treadmill > 49 hours walking through beautiful countryside followed by 1 hour on a treadmill. Perfect
Yep. Anyone know what the starter area in Rift looks like from memory? I started beta, pushed through the first 5 zones in 10 minutes (or less), turned of the game and never went back. I've been waiting for a good MMO for a very long time.
The only thing i remember in rift was 1 of my characters out of 4, and umm that first PvP areana thing where u need to hold that crystal thing. Thats it and i played that game for a reasonable amount of time.
Now with EQ which i havant played since around 2004 or so i can literaly remember 95% of the zone names and how there connected together which zones connect to what and so on. Along with majority of the layouts and maps in my heads.
This. Although my mental maps are more of the dungeons since I played monk and you either learned where the hell everything was or you died pretty damn quick.
For me, it's not about the length or the challenge per se, but about the believability of a task/quest.
I most current MMOs, there's little connection to quests/tasks and the rewards. Kill 10 rats and pick a pair of boots, go talk to Bob and get a hat! And the reason for the task is normally the reward with no real connection between the two.
For example of what I loved, was EQ's newb armor quest. You received a quest to go get the components to make each piece of your armor. So you had a quest to get items from several mobs and NPCs all spread out to make each piece and the whole armor set took several levels to earn. This gives the quests the feeling of adventure I imagine when I read fantasy novels.
I don't recall Drizz't being given Icingdeath for killing 10 cave rats, 4 feet from the questgiver, Drizz't got that sword by slaying a dragon in it's lair in a barren forgotten place. Rand Al'Thor didn't just go talk to the innkeeper to get the horn of Valere.
TL;DR the more work/risk involved in a task, the greater the reward.
They seem to think longer, tedious, time consuming, etc is synonymous to challenging and difficult.
Right, an inability to separate challenge from time consumption is definitely a factor.
This is really just an extension of the money-grab of early subscription games. For decades games didn't have excessive timesinks, and then suddenly a new business model comes along (subscriptions) which charged for time, and at the exact same time excessive timesinks start to be part of games (and just those games.) It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to notice the correlation, but if we wanted we could hear it from a MMORPG's lead designer as they define timesink in their own words too.
But there's this strange trait to veteran MMORPG players where many of them will still defend timesinks to this day, even after you point out how it was just a blatant money grab. It's a strange psychological trait.
The money grab of early subscriptions, yea because 15 bucks all inclusive a month is just such a money grab compared to item mall cash shops that sell the game in pay to win pieces and charge a subscription on top of that.
So laughable. Why not tell us something else completely laughable like that time you said EVE online was buy to play.
Gonna guess you never played MUDs that were mostly completely free and had huge timesinks, you know the things they based EQ and early MMORPGs on...
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
You already know why. Because the shorter the content, the faster you get to the top and do nothing but raid and pvp for hours and hours and hours on. It doesn't take alot to understand it.
The Vets that began with Pen & Paper RPGs, equate MMORPGs to those Pen & Paper RPGs, and thus want that same type of experience. That experience entailed creating a character, building that character, playing that character, all within the realm of a world and it's storylines, while forging that character's own stories. In Pen & Paper RPGs, you did not create a character and expect to ditch the game in a month. Instead, you followed along with the character as you would in any TV episode, but you got to participate through that character. You invested in that character, grew attached to that character, as well as those other players/characters that your character crossed paths with. This was also an extension from the Pen & Paper RPGs, as those "others" were your in real life friends, which was one reason why communities seemed better back in the day given that aspect must have been a part of Vets' outlook going into MMORPGs. MMORPGs were expected to be long termed hobbies, long termed adventuring, long termed building.
"Long content" is just another extension of that which Vets have carried with them from the Pen & Paper RPGs. So no. Today's Devs are not going to see any praise until they can grasp the basic concept of what an MMORPG should be.
I am glad you brought this up. You see I understand where you are coming from with this (though I guess I am on the other side of the arguement). But this is the crux of the problem with vet outlook on the games of old. They viewed them from this perspective. In fact I will go as far to say that the entire community viewed them from this perspective. And it is this community perspective, this imagined way we thought the game should be, that brought about the enjoyment, not at all the particular mechanics that drove those games.
In other words it was the way we imagined those mechanics to work, not the way they actually worked that made the experience so well received. When the community figured out the intracacies of aggro (the only factor that drove AI) and the precise casting chain orders, when we understood precisely what mob was where, what dropped and by what percentage. When we understood how to maximize xp gain and where to level and why. When we started to "Game" the system because we knew the system and its rules precisely. The magic started to fade. We started to see the wizard behind the curtain and our collective imaginations started to falter.
The problem was that the simulation really was horrible, these mechanics don't encourage community or healthy gameplay. They are divisive, they serve to cluster and break up communities and exclude and ever increasing set of players as the persistent age of the server creeps on. They were overly punitive and frustrating in the extreme. These games thrived despite these horrible mechanics not because of them. They thrived on the backs of our collective imagining of these worlds because we as a community Pen and Paper nerds were so well trained at filling in the gaps. We believed that the simulation could be as good at balancing a play experience as a real human GM and so we actively ignored or didn't notice the holes in the world.
If you want to believe this was the golden age of MMORPG gaming, fine. But don't for a second believe that: harsh death penalties, 8 hour dungeons, long camps, random drops, naked corpse recoveries, yelling LFG for hours on end, repeatable unrewarding simply quests, 5 minute down times, spawn camping, 30 minute boat rides, huge power disparities per level that only divided the population in clusters further reducing the total number viable players to play with, mindnumbing boring and simple combat mechanics, kill stealing, rare drop ninja looting, and 20 hours of the same camp killing the same mobs over and over per character level, made those game great. It wasn't those mechanics, in fact some of those mechanics were that way because of technical limitations and had nothing to do with delibrate design.
Bringing back these mechanics won't make modern games any better. If you want blame something for the downfall of the MMORPGs blame Min/Maxing, don't blame 15 minute dungeouns or LFG tools. Those things only exist to maximize the number of players you have to play with. The fact that modern dungeon runs are overly focused on completeing them as fast as possible with as little interaction as possible is not LFG tool problem it's a "community that games the completely mechanical simulated world system only concerning itself with an ever increasing item level" problem.
For me, it's not about the length or the challenge per se, but about the believability of a task/quest.
I most current MMOs, there's little connection to quests/tasks and the rewards. Kill 10 rats and pick a pair of boots, go talk to Bob and get a hat! And the reason for the task is normally the reward with no real connection between the two.
For example of what I loved, was EQ's newb armor quest. You received a quest to go get the components to make each piece of your armor. So you had a quest to get items from several mobs and NPCs all spread out to make each piece and the whole armor set took several levels to earn. This gives the quests the feeling of adventure I imagine when I read fantasy novels.
I don't recall Drizz't being given Icingdeath for killing 10 cave rats, 4 feet from the questgiver, Drizz't got that sword by slaying a dragon in it's lair in a barren forgotten place. Rand Al'Thor didn't just go talk to the innkeeper to get the horn of Valere.
TL;DR the more work/risk involved in a task, the greater the reward.
This is realy important in games imo, Quests need to feel like quests and adventures not killed 10 rats and get a shiny new pair of boots. They should be rather length but the reward should match the time/difficulty of completling them
I often see mmo vets bemoan current titles because dungeons and the like can be soloed or done in 5-10 mins unlike in the past where it was face-stompingly hard (I'm assuming). Nothing wrong with this, I like a challenge myself, but thinking about it further I realized something. Isn't this content BETTER for vets? It's probably not a stretch to say this content was designed with you in mind. By now, most vets are in their 30s or 40s with a family, job, etc with very sparse time.
If challenging/long content WAS developed vets wouldnt be able to participate in it because of their limited time. So shouldnt we be seeing the opposite? Shouldnt vets be praising new developers for making content they can solo between a hectic life?
I think you assume far too much here. I have been playing PC games as a hobby since I was in my late 20's. Started somewhere in the 80's. Was married and had one son at the time. Never stopped me from playing any "long" content at that time. And as I got older, I had more kids (total of 4) and continued to play those long content type of games on PC/console. I even got three of my kids into the hobby themselves and they have played right along with me to this day. As I approach 60 (next month) I am still concerned when content is short changed. Give any content that takes days if not weeks to complete and I am very happy.
Now, I am not saying that SOME shorted content is not a good thing. In fact, sprinkling a LITTLE in once and a while helps pacing. But if it becomes ALL short content, no thanks...not worth the money.
MMORPG's have RPG in their title. Role Playing Game. That directly ties them to pen-and-paper RPG experiences. When you log into a new MMORPG, you expect to share some of that experience.
As others have said, in old pen-and-paper RPG's, you spent a lot of time creating, bulding up, and exploring your character and the world around them. Assuming you had a reasonable DM, you had a series of short adventures which were all part of a bigger storyline, which you (and your friends) discovered as you wandered around doing things.
The key points here are that the leveling process took a LONG time, and it was the most important part of the game. In most pen-and-paper RPG's, once you hit the level cap, you were pretty much done. Sure, the DM could keep it going for a while, but leading an army as a general isn't nearly as immersive or exciting as charging enemies with your weapon of choice.
Another important point is that everything you did was interesting and important. Sure, you had random encounters (usually in the middle of the night while your mages were TRYING to recover their spells), but they were there to keep the players on their toes, and give them some needed experience and goods, so they'd be ready for the next adventure.
With that in mind, any time you are in town and talking to NPC's to find quests, you expect those quests to be meaningful. You do NOT expect a quest to go kill 10 bears and return their tongues for a few silver. You do NOT expect a quest to deliver a message to a guy standing 30 feet away. That kind of filler nonsense should remain as random encounters out in the wild, not as things people "desperately" need done in town.
So, it's not that 20 or 30 minute dungeons are BAD. Sometimes I want to spend my whole 3 hours of playtime doing a big long epic dungeon, or even just a part of one. Other times, I want to run around exploring and maybe run a quick dungeon. There's nothing wrong with that. However, slow the level progression waaaaaaay down.
Yeah, I mean it.
The fun part of the game should be watching your character grow in power, exploring the world, and learning how to do new things. The "endgame" that everyone rushes to is incredibly boring. Some of you are in denial about that, but it is... let me tell you why.
At the level cap, you won't ever learn any new skills, spells, or abilities. You can shuffle them around, but you are all you will ever be (until the next expansion). You have also likely explored all the world's content. Even if you haven't, most games don't de-level you when you go to lower level zones, so wandering around and exploring all the zones you skipped because you leveled too fast is pointless, other than to see what they look like. No useful rewards are there, and experience doesn't matter to you at endgame.
The "endgame" content is a set of dungeons which look cool, and have interesting mechanics, but are only a short adventure that is quickly consumed and memorized. Yet, they stagger them into tiers that have gear requirements, so while you can explore a new zone for weeks (if the leveling pace were reasonable), even an "epic" dungeon will be done in a day or two. Most are done in an hour. And then, you have to grind them out, over and over and over again, until you get the right slot machine drop to improve your epic pants, and can move on to the next hour worth of content, which you will then repeat dozens or hundreds of times to get the next slot machine drop.
That isn't role playing. That is gambling.
So, in effect, MMO's pull a bait-and-switch on you. You start out with the reasonable expectation that you're playing an RPG that will occupy your attention for months, if not years. Then you find out that you are being rushed through the world where the role playing might actually happen, and shoved into the grind that is "endgame" raiding. Now, you aren't playing an RPG, you are pulling a slot machine lever in the hopes that a treat will drop from the slot at the end.
I often see mmo vets bemoan current titles because dungeons and the like can be soloed or done in 5-10 mins unlike in the past where it was face-stompingly hard (I'm assuming). Nothing wrong wrong with this, I like a challenge myself, but thinking about it further I realized something. Isn't this content BETTER for vets? It's probably not a stretch to say this content was designed with you in mind. By now, most vets are in their 30s or 40s with a family, job, etc with very sparse time.
If challenging/long content WAS developed vets wouldnt be able to participate in it because of their limited time. So shouldnt we be seeing the opposite? Shouldnt vets be praising new developers for making content they can solo between a hectic life?
They seem to think longer, tedious, time consuming, etc is synonymous to challenging and difficult.
Sarcasm? I hope so.
OP, you answered your own question when you said - "... I like a challenge myself ..." (you also assume a lot of nonsense)
It's pretty safe to say that if a task is completed solo and within 5-10 minutes on a regular basis that it's not a very challenging task. Now if the amount of time to complete the task by doing everything flawlessly takes 5-10 minutes, sure, but if flawless is possible that means something is predictable and again, probably not terribly challenging.
Nope, no sarcasm at all. That statement is very true and I'm pretty damn sure you can't disaprove the fact that taking longer is not synonymous to challenge and difficulty.
Oh no, it's true that they're not synonymous with each other, I figured sarcasm because it was a completely retarded thing to assume. I thought you were being funny, but now I laugh at you instead.
MMORPG's have RPG in their title. Role Playing Game. That directly ties them to pen-and-paper RPG experiences. When you log into a new MMORPG, you expect to share some of that experience.
As others have said, in old pen-and-paper RPG's, you spent a lot of time creating, bulding up, and exploring your character and the world around them. Assuming you had a reasonable DM, you had a series of short adventures which were all part of a bigger storyline, which you (and your friends) discovered as you wandered around doing things.
The key points here are that the leveling process took a LONG time, and it was the most important part of the game. In most pen-and-paper RPG's, once you hit the level cap, you were pretty much done. Sure, the DM could keep it going for a while, but leading an army as a general isn't nearly as immersive or exciting as charging enemies with your weapon of choice.
Another important point is that everything you did was interesting and important. Sure, you had random encounters (usually in the middle of the night while your mages were TRYING to recover their spells), but they were there to keep the players on their toes, and give them some needed experience and goods, so they'd be ready for the next adventure.
With that in mind, any time you are in town and talking to NPC's to find quests, you expect those quests to be meaningful. You do NOT expect a quest to go kill 10 bears and return their tongues for a few silver. You do NOT expect a quest to deliver a message to a guy standing 30 feet away. That kind of filler nonsense should remain as random encounters out in the wild, not as things people "desperately" need done in town.
So, it's not that 20 or 30 minute dungeons are BAD. Sometimes I want to spend my whole 3 hours of playtime doing a big long epic dungeon, or even just a part of one. Other times, I want to run around exploring and maybe run a quick dungeon. There's nothing wrong with that. However, slow the level progression waaaaaaay down.
Yeah, I mean it.
The fun part of the game should be watching your character grow in power, exploring the world, and learning how to do new things. The "endgame" that everyone rushes to is incredibly boring. Some of you are in denial about that, but it is... let me tell you why.
At the level cap, you won't ever learn any new skills, spells, or abilities. You can shuffle them around, but you are all you will ever be (until the next expansion). You have also likely explored all the world's content. Even if you haven't, most games don't de-level you when you go to lower level zones, so wandering around and exploring all the zones you skipped because you leveled too fast is pointless, other than to see what they look like. No useful rewards are there, and experience doesn't matter to you at endgame.
The "endgame" content is a set of dungeons which look cool, and have interesting mechanics, but are only a short adventure that is quickly consumed and memorized. Yet, they stagger them into tiers that have gear requirements, so while you can explore a new zone for weeks (if the leveling pace were reasonable), even an "epic" dungeon will be done in a day or two. Most are done in an hour. And then, you have to grind them out, over and over and over again, until you get the right slot machine drop to improve your epic pants, and can move on to the next hour worth of content, which you will then repeat dozens or hundreds of times to get the next slot machine drop.
That isn't role playing. That is gambling.
So, in effect, MMO's pull a bait-and-switch on you. You start out with the reasonable expectation that you're playing an RPG that will occupy your attention for months, if not years. Then you find out that you are being rushed through the world where the role playing might actually happen, and shoved into the grind that is "endgame" raiding. Now, you aren't playing an RPG, you are pulling a slot machine lever in the hopes that a treat will drop from the slot at the end.
This.
I am an old bastid.. been doing RPGs since the Atari was big.... When the MUDs then MMOs started showing up on PC I was all over them....now....
I avoid them for the most part as they are all the same.... sure a few mechanics are different.. but for the most part they are carbon copies. I waited for a new type of MMO... I jumped at Star Citizen at first.... im still holding out for it... but I dont think its going to be the fun PVE universe everyone is hoping for.... More a PVE universe where its alot of PVP and a lil PVE.
Then I heard about Citadel of Sorcery.. I noticed it failed in Kick starter because amateurs decided to not fund it based on pre alpha graphics... noobs lol well they come in all shapes and money brackets... so I decide to go on a limb and donated to its crowd funding.. its still going through development and the more I hear about it the more I am looking forward to it going to publisher. I really want to see it come to fruition.
If you are looking for a change to the current MMOs look at Citadel of Sorcery.. it may have the answers you are looking for in an MMO.. at worst it'll have game mechanics found no where else in the industry...
So you agree my simple statement is TRUE. It was THAT SIMPLE. I said nothing more or less. You folks are the ones that totally try to disprove it with nothing but nonsense analogies. It was fun though, I'll tell you that. LOL
No one is saying that 15 - 30 minute fights cannot be challenging. Most solo fights in EQ1 could take 15 minutes to accomplish.
What older vets like myself are arguing is that we don't believe long durations = challenging. We are saying challenging back in the "golden years," usually lead to long durations. These long durations are what we cherished because all of our social bonds were created as a result.
Today's games have little or no downtime, and the challenges are overwith quickly so that there are no social bonds created as there is simply no time to create them. And that is the problem with MMOs today - they simply do not allow the community to bond because their design discourages social grouping, or even more so, the need to group at all.
EQ1 in the golden years had it right. Hopefully Pantheon brings it back.
Would you rather have sex with 4 gorgeous and amazing in bed people, that lasted 15 minutes at a time... or spend 60 minutes once with someone who is gorgeous and amazing in bed?
Fixed that for you. Unless, of course, you're working off of the ridiculously poor assumption that a 15-minute dungeon compared to a 60-minute dungeon has worse graphics, lower AI or some other equally absurd premise.
I expect a reply of circular logic as to how the 15-minute dungeon is lower quality ("ugly") because it isn't a 60-minute dungeon.
60 minutes: Because most chicks want at least 15 min of foreplay and 4 chicks at 15 min each will leave a man painfully blue-balled.
I often see mmo vets bemoan current titles because dungeons and the like can be soloed or done in 5-10 mins unlike in the past where it was face-stompingly hard (I'm assuming). Nothing wrong wrong with this, I like a challenge myself, but thinking about it further I realized something. Isn't this content BETTER for vets? It's probably not a stretch to say this content was designed with you in mind. By now, most vets are in their 30s or 40s with a family, job, etc with very sparse time.
If challenging/long content WAS developed vets wouldnt be able to participate in it because of their limited time. So shouldnt we be seeing the opposite? Shouldnt vets be praising new developers for making content they can solo between a hectic life?
They seem to think longer, tedious, time consuming, etc is synonymous to challenging and difficult.
Sarcasm? I hope so.
OP, you answered your own question when you said - "... I like a challenge myself ..." (you also assume a lot of nonsense)
It's pretty safe to say that if a task is completed solo and within 5-10 minutes on a regular basis that it's not a very challenging task. Now if the amount of time to complete the task by doing everything flawlessly takes 5-10 minutes, sure, but if flawless is possible that means something is predictable and again, probably not terribly challenging.
Nope, no sarcasm at all. That statement is very true and I'm pretty damn sure you can't disaprove the fact that taking longer is not synonymous to challenge and difficulty.
Oh no, it's true that they're not synonymous with each other, I figured sarcasm because it was a completely retarded thing to assume. I thought you were being funny, but now I laugh at you instead.
LMFAO laugh all you want, I've been enjoying myself commenting to people that's been trying to disprove it. Won't be hurting my feelings one bit. You agree it's true, good for you.
The Vets that began with Pen & Paper RPGs, equate MMORPGs to those Pen & Paper RPGs, and thus want that same type of experience. That experience entailed creating a character, building that character, playing that character, all within the realm of a world and it's storylines, while forging that character's own stories. In Pen & Paper RPGs, you did not create a character and expect to ditch the game in a month. Instead, you followed along with the character as you would in any TV episode, but you got to participate through that character. You invested in that character, grew attached to that character, as well as those other players/characters that your character crossed paths with. This was also an extension from the Pen & Paper RPGs, as those "others" were your in real life friends, which was one reason why communities seemed better back in the day given that aspect must have been a part of Vets' outlook going into MMORPGs. MMORPGs were expected to be long termed hobbies, long termed adventuring, long termed building.
"Long content" is just another extension of that which Vets have carried with them from the Pen & Paper RPGs. So no. Today's Devs are not going to see any praise until they can grasp the basic concept of what an MMORPG should be.
I often see mmo vets bemoan current titles because dungeons and the like can be soloed or done in 5-10 mins unlike in the past where it was face-stompingly hard (I'm assuming). Nothing wrong wrong with this, I like a challenge myself, but thinking about it further I realized something. Isn't this content BETTER for vets? It's probably not a stretch to say this content was designed with you in mind. By now, most vets are in their 30s or 40s with a family, job, etc with very sparse time.
If challenging/long content WAS developed vets wouldnt be able to participate in it because of their limited time. So shouldnt we be seeing the opposite? Shouldnt vets be praising new developers for making content they can solo between a hectic life?
I do have way more spare time since i started to work. No idea why other students have so much spare time, but i certainly did not. Now i just work my 5-10 hours a day and have plenty of spare time left. Helps that my better half is playing games as well i guess.
Also id much rather spend my day bashing my head against a wall then playing current gen easymodes. There is just no fun to be had for me if failing is not possible and all i do is questing solo. I WANT to group up, i WANT to socialize and i WANT to do dungeons that can not be cleared within a few days. Days? Yes days. You don't have to clear a dungeon in one go.
So no, i don't think the current developers design games for me. And since everyone i see screaming for even easier and shorter content is sub 20, i kinda see a trend on who might be the target.
Originally posted by vandal5627
They seem to think longer, tedious, time consuming, etc is synonymous to challenging and difficult.
You obviously have no idea what people are asking for, or you would not write this at all. If you make CURRENT games longer they would be tedious and time consuming without fun and challenge. I agree.
Back in the EQ days dungeons simply used to be HUGE and FUN.
Tedious? Hell no! It was fun. Not because it was big, but because it was well made AND big. if something is fun, you want more of it. That simple.
Time consuming? Yes, no doubt. But if it is fun, that is no negative point at all.
Challenging? Yes, but not because it was long, but because it was possible to fail and die. Something current MMOs don't offer anymore.
Bottomline: Current MMOs lack the fun and quality to make longer dungeons enjoyable. So i do understand why people want shorter, to get it done and forget it. You can not simply make huge dungeons and think it will succeed. You have to make a game that is fun to play. If you got that everyone will want longer dungeons, more dungeons, less quests, more socialization ect.
On the other hand: if you make a game like we keep getting today,... well. The shorter the better. Get your fast fix and be done with it. Or better yet: don't play at all.
So you agree my simple statement is TRUE. It was THAT SIMPLE. I said nothing more or less. You folks are the ones that totally try to disprove it with nothing but nonsense analogies. It was fun though, I'll tell you that. LOL
No one is saying that 15 - 30 minute fights cannot be challenging. Most solo fights in EQ1 could take 15 minutes to accomplish.
What older vets like myself are arguing is that we don't believe long durations = challenging. We are saying challenging back in the "golden years," usually lead to long durations. These long durations are what we cherished because all of our social bonds were created as a result.
Today's games have little or no downtime, and the challenges are overwith quickly so that there are no social bonds created as there is simply no time to create them. And that is the problem with MMOs today - they simply do not allow the community to bond because their design discourages social grouping, or even more so, the need to group at all.
EQ1 in the golden years had it right. Hopefully Pantheon brings it back.
Social bonds is what YOU make of it. If you can't make friends it's all on you not the game. If you require a game to help you make friends you gots problems.
As others have said, in old pen-and-paper RPG's, you spent a lot of time creating, bulding up, and exploring your character and the world around them. Assuming you had a reasonable DM, you had a series of short adventures which were all part of a bigger storyline, which you (and your friends) discovered as you wandered around doing things.
The key points here are that the leveling process took a LONG time, and it was the most important part of the game. In most pen-and-paper RPG's, once you hit the level cap, you were pretty much done. Sure, the DM could keep it going for a while, but leading an army as a general isn't nearly as immersive or exciting as charging enemies with your weapon of choice.
Another important point is that everything you did was interesting and important. Sure, you had random encounters (usually in the middle of the night while your mages were TRYING to recover their spells), but they were there to keep the players on their toes, and give them some needed experience and goods, so they'd be ready for the next adventure.
...
So, it's not that 20 or 30 minute dungeons are BAD. Sometimes I want to spend my whole 3 hours of playtime doing a big long epic dungeon, or even just a part of one. Other times, I want to run around exploring and maybe run a quick dungeon. There's nothing wrong with that. However, slow the level progression waaaaaaay down.
Yeah, I mean it.
The fun part of the game should be watching your character grow in power, exploring the world, and learning how to do new things. The "endgame" that everyone rushes to is incredibly boring. Some of you are in denial about that, but it is... let me tell you why.
...
The "endgame" content is a set of dungeons which look cool, and have interesting mechanics, but are only a short adventure that is quickly consumed and memorized. Yet, they stagger them into tiers that have gear requirements, so while you can explore a new zone for weeks (if the leveling pace were reasonable), even an "epic" dungeon will be done in a day or two. Most are done in an hour. And then, you have to grind them out, over and over and over again, until you get the right slot machine drop to improve your epic pants, and can move on to the next hour worth of content, which you will then repeat dozens or hundreds of times to get the next slot machine drop.
That isn't role playing. That is gambling.
So, in effect, MMO's pull a bait-and-switch on you. You start out with the reasonable expectation that you're playing an RPG that will occupy your attention for months, if not years. Then you find out that you are being rushed through the world where the role playing might actually happen, and shoved into the grind that is "endgame" raiding. Now, you aren't playing an RPG, you are pulling a slot machine lever in the hopes that a treat will drop from the slot at the end.
As great as MMOs are, fantastic as thier potential could be, they will never ,short of a revolution in AI, be as good a play experience as PnP. They cannot craft an play experience tailored specifically to a group or player. Cooperative single player games might be able to approach that but even they fall a bit short.
This isn't a simple problem solved by simply increasing the leveling speed. I just isn't. The leveling speed of modern games is set at that pace to because it impossible to have a unique ungrindy play experience with long leveling times. EQ and the games around that time had content that was essentially camping in the exact same spots for literally days at a time, to gain one single level. It was proposterous and should have been an insult to any Pen and Paper vet.
The problem was that unlike PnP GM games, the servers were always on, players could and on average did play every night of the week for hours. You simple can't, as a developer, create that much unique content for players. You can't. In the PnP realm, you likely built a character slowly over one to two years (or more) but its not like you played 20-30 hours a week, every week. Realistically it was once or twice a week on average.
The old MMOs solved the issue in the the most direct way and simplest way. They simply added some zeros to the XP curve. Instead of killing 20-30 knolls to level now you had to kill hundreds. They made death penalties harsh enough to put you back hours of "work" should you make the slighest mistake and they had huge zones mostly filled with empty space that you had to traverse over hours to get anywhere. They also forced mandatory downtime/recovery time on the order of 5 minutes or more between fights. It was the most obvious and easiest way to solve the content issue, but there was nothing clever or revolutionary about this solution. The result was some of the most boring, agonizingly tedious "gameplay" the gaming world has ever seen. But the experience was shared and nothing like we had ever experienced before so that made it a little more tolerable. Make no mistake however, they threw fun and engaging gameplay under the bus for the sake of your long tail character development.
Newer MMOs did the opposite they sacrificed long character development for the sake of fun and engaging gameplay. They brute force created the exact amount of content to fill their levels to keep players busy to 100-200 hours and development costs soared to literally 100's of millions of dollars. While this still isn't your ideal MMORPG as least they made the effort to make your time entertaining with out resorting to intellectually lazy fix of just stretching out content by increasing xp requirements.
They did the long tail character development thing too really, but they did it at max level/raiding level. But instead of increasing the xp requirement along the leveling curve forcing you to fight hundreds of the same mob over and over, at max level they force you to fight a single boss mob, replace xp with random drop gear grinds and only ALLOW you to fight the progression mob once a week. Its the same solution just expressed in a different manner.
By now, most vets are in their 30s or 40s with a family, job, etc with very sparse time.
Funny, but I started playing MMOs at 40, had a family, job, etc with very sparse time... I'm now 50 with the same family, different job, etc with very sparse time. Only thing that is different now is the games aren't as engaging as they used to be. I mean really, if you liked the game, you'd make the time for it. I sure did back in the day. Games today just aren't worth making the time for anymore. I haven't changed as much as the games have. You change the game, you change the draw.
And let's stop with the 'vets' reference... it's not like you served in a combat zone and survived. You play video games and have played them for a while. Does going to school qualify you to be a vet of school? Having a job make you a vet of work? Sleeping every night make you a vet of sleep? Not everyone in the military is given veteran status... so merely serving doesn't give you that title. There are plenty of people who have served who are not called vets. They are merely referred to as 'retired' or 'former'. No one has earned the title 'vet' playing a video game. They just take it on to give them some sort of ego status.
Comments
Again, only skill gives a challenge meaning.
You can consider it a challenge. You can excitedly celebrate how you went on a long trip and beat the challenge of boredom! Those near you will look at you strangely, because you won't have actually done anything meaningful -- you won't have done anything worth celebrating.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
My posts haven't been very long, and nearly all of them have focused on skill as the difference between meaningful and meaningless challenge. Are you trying to imply you thought it took no skills to develop, produce, and fly a rocket to land on the moon? None at all?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The only thing i remember in rift was 1 of my characters out of 4, and umm that first PvP areana thing where u need to hold that crystal thing. Thats it and i played that game for a reasonable amount of time.
Now with EQ which i havant played since around 2004 or so i can literaly remember 95% of the zone names and how there connected together which zones connect to what and so on. Along with majority of the layouts and maps in my heads.
I didn't read all of this, but I feel obliged to chip in regardless. I'm certain this sentiment has been shared already.
I consider myself a "vet."
I've had a lot of fun with modern games. With solo games. With RPGs. With console games. Heck, even with card games and board games.
But absolutely nothing has ever topped that feeling of downing that raid target, for the first time, after weeks of preparation, practice, struggle and drama, with a group of 70/50/30/20... (notice the number keeps dropping as the years go by, once it got down to around 10 people or less it didn't really feel that epic any longer, at least to me).
I'll never forget a lot of my first Everquest raid kills, and there are entire expansions worth of content I could still go through and map out nearly every map and encounter, and I still lament over some of the loot that I never got to drop, and kick myself for items I passed on (or got stupidly). I still have rows of hotkeys for raids that were a decade ago - and the one hotkey I mashed every time I needed people to pay attention (this was before Vent/TS/Mumble took over all communication, and wouldn't have worked well with 50+ people anyway). I won't forget a lot of my WoW raid kills, and the work our entire guild had to do to farm up materials, crafting items, potions, food, resist gear, and repuation. I had fun with it, but I've already forgotten what I killed in ESO last weekend.
There is nothing in my gaming history that can surpass that moment of elation, and those very few moments make up for all the derp mistakes, the heartache, the drama, and a lot of other BS we put up with. If I'm entirely honest about it, there are very few moments in my life period that compare to those moments. The second, third, fifteenth kills, those weren't so much fun. The kills where you go through hopping on one foot with both arms tied behind your back to earn some achievement - not so much fun, your fighting some artificial constraint placed on the encounter, not the encounter itself. Those genuinely difficult encounters that took a lot of patience, cooperation, preparation, and just a little luck - those first kills were the best.
And nothing out there is like that any more. I keep going back to EQ over and over, and it's not the same game. WoW isn't the same it was 10 years ago.
They were extremely rare, but those moments, they were that good.
That's what I want. The content was part of it, but so were the people - and the way the game brought us all together, that's really what I want back.
^This
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THIS ... This is exactly correct
Gamers these days think a dungeon is anything less than a fox-hole but longer than their socks
Many of us grew up on PnP games, we are USED to dungeons that run all week and if anything like the bunch i knew, the DM created his own world, own adventures for us to laugh at the thief in (tbh, he deserved every death) not the stuff you bought and run in a night.
MMO's once had huge ass quests, dungeon's which took ages and we enjoyed it, we understood that an mmo was a game genre you put TIME into to get places. Not the watered down stuff they give out these days, if you liked the niche and had the time, you played, if you didn't have time you logged on when you did and everyone understood.
Not 'oh i have 30 mins, this game takes too long, smaller dungeons, more rest xp so i can keep up with those who have the time'
If you don't have the time the games used to require, tbh you shouldn't be playing the genre
This. Although my mental maps are more of the dungeons since I played monk and you either learned where the hell everything was or you died pretty damn quick.
For me, it's not about the length or the challenge per se, but about the believability of a task/quest.
I most current MMOs, there's little connection to quests/tasks and the rewards. Kill 10 rats and pick a pair of boots, go talk to Bob and get a hat! And the reason for the task is normally the reward with no real connection between the two.
For example of what I loved, was EQ's newb armor quest. You received a quest to go get the components to make each piece of your armor. So you had a quest to get items from several mobs and NPCs all spread out to make each piece and the whole armor set took several levels to earn. This gives the quests the feeling of adventure I imagine when I read fantasy novels.
I don't recall Drizz't being given Icingdeath for killing 10 cave rats, 4 feet from the questgiver, Drizz't got that sword by slaying a dragon in it's lair in a barren forgotten place. Rand Al'Thor didn't just go talk to the innkeeper to get the horn of Valere.
TL;DR the more work/risk involved in a task, the greater the reward.
The money grab of early subscriptions, yea because 15 bucks all inclusive a month is just such a money grab compared to item mall cash shops that sell the game in pay to win pieces and charge a subscription on top of that.
So laughable. Why not tell us something else completely laughable like that time you said EVE online was buy to play.
Gonna guess you never played MUDs that were mostly completely free and had huge timesinks, you know the things they based EQ and early MMORPGs on...
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/I am glad you brought this up. You see I understand where you are coming from with this (though I guess I am on the other side of the arguement). But this is the crux of the problem with vet outlook on the games of old. They viewed them from this perspective. In fact I will go as far to say that the entire community viewed them from this perspective. And it is this community perspective, this imagined way we thought the game should be, that brought about the enjoyment, not at all the particular mechanics that drove those games.
In other words it was the way we imagined those mechanics to work, not the way they actually worked that made the experience so well received. When the community figured out the intracacies of aggro (the only factor that drove AI) and the precise casting chain orders, when we understood precisely what mob was where, what dropped and by what percentage. When we understood how to maximize xp gain and where to level and why. When we started to "Game" the system because we knew the system and its rules precisely. The magic started to fade. We started to see the wizard behind the curtain and our collective imaginations started to falter.
The problem was that the simulation really was horrible, these mechanics don't encourage community or healthy gameplay. They are divisive, they serve to cluster and break up communities and exclude and ever increasing set of players as the persistent age of the server creeps on. They were overly punitive and frustrating in the extreme. These games thrived despite these horrible mechanics not because of them. They thrived on the backs of our collective imagining of these worlds because we as a community Pen and Paper nerds were so well trained at filling in the gaps. We believed that the simulation could be as good at balancing a play experience as a real human GM and so we actively ignored or didn't notice the holes in the world.
If you want to believe this was the golden age of MMORPG gaming, fine. But don't for a second believe that: harsh death penalties, 8 hour dungeons, long camps, random drops, naked corpse recoveries, yelling LFG for hours on end, repeatable unrewarding simply quests, 5 minute down times, spawn camping, 30 minute boat rides, huge power disparities per level that only divided the population in clusters further reducing the total number viable players to play with, mindnumbing boring and simple combat mechanics, kill stealing, rare drop ninja looting, and 20 hours of the same camp killing the same mobs over and over per character level, made those game great. It wasn't those mechanics, in fact some of those mechanics were that way because of technical limitations and had nothing to do with delibrate design.
Bringing back these mechanics won't make modern games any better. If you want blame something for the downfall of the MMORPGs blame Min/Maxing, don't blame 15 minute dungeouns or LFG tools. Those things only exist to maximize the number of players you have to play with. The fact that modern dungeon runs are overly focused on completeing them as fast as possible with as little interaction as possible is not LFG tool problem it's a "community that games the completely mechanical simulated world system only concerning itself with an ever increasing item level" problem.
This is realy important in games imo, Quests need to feel like quests and adventures not killed 10 rats and get a shiny new pair of boots. They should be rather length but the reward should match the time/difficulty of completling them
I think you assume far too much here. I have been playing PC games as a hobby since I was in my late 20's. Started somewhere in the 80's. Was married and had one son at the time. Never stopped me from playing any "long" content at that time. And as I got older, I had more kids (total of 4) and continued to play those long content type of games on PC/console. I even got three of my kids into the hobby themselves and they have played right along with me to this day. As I approach 60 (next month) I am still concerned when content is short changed. Give any content that takes days if not weeks to complete and I am very happy.
Now, I am not saying that SOME shorted content is not a good thing. In fact, sprinkling a LITTLE in once and a while helps pacing. But if it becomes ALL short content, no thanks...not worth the money.
Let's party like it is 1863!
It really isn't that complicated.
MMORPG's have RPG in their title. Role Playing Game. That directly ties them to pen-and-paper RPG experiences. When you log into a new MMORPG, you expect to share some of that experience.
As others have said, in old pen-and-paper RPG's, you spent a lot of time creating, bulding up, and exploring your character and the world around them. Assuming you had a reasonable DM, you had a series of short adventures which were all part of a bigger storyline, which you (and your friends) discovered as you wandered around doing things.
The key points here are that the leveling process took a LONG time, and it was the most important part of the game. In most pen-and-paper RPG's, once you hit the level cap, you were pretty much done. Sure, the DM could keep it going for a while, but leading an army as a general isn't nearly as immersive or exciting as charging enemies with your weapon of choice.
Another important point is that everything you did was interesting and important. Sure, you had random encounters (usually in the middle of the night while your mages were TRYING to recover their spells), but they were there to keep the players on their toes, and give them some needed experience and goods, so they'd be ready for the next adventure.
With that in mind, any time you are in town and talking to NPC's to find quests, you expect those quests to be meaningful. You do NOT expect a quest to go kill 10 bears and return their tongues for a few silver. You do NOT expect a quest to deliver a message to a guy standing 30 feet away. That kind of filler nonsense should remain as random encounters out in the wild, not as things people "desperately" need done in town.
So, it's not that 20 or 30 minute dungeons are BAD. Sometimes I want to spend my whole 3 hours of playtime doing a big long epic dungeon, or even just a part of one. Other times, I want to run around exploring and maybe run a quick dungeon. There's nothing wrong with that. However, slow the level progression waaaaaaay down.
Yeah, I mean it.
The fun part of the game should be watching your character grow in power, exploring the world, and learning how to do new things. The "endgame" that everyone rushes to is incredibly boring. Some of you are in denial about that, but it is... let me tell you why.
At the level cap, you won't ever learn any new skills, spells, or abilities. You can shuffle them around, but you are all you will ever be (until the next expansion). You have also likely explored all the world's content. Even if you haven't, most games don't de-level you when you go to lower level zones, so wandering around and exploring all the zones you skipped because you leveled too fast is pointless, other than to see what they look like. No useful rewards are there, and experience doesn't matter to you at endgame.
The "endgame" content is a set of dungeons which look cool, and have interesting mechanics, but are only a short adventure that is quickly consumed and memorized. Yet, they stagger them into tiers that have gear requirements, so while you can explore a new zone for weeks (if the leveling pace were reasonable), even an "epic" dungeon will be done in a day or two. Most are done in an hour. And then, you have to grind them out, over and over and over again, until you get the right slot machine drop to improve your epic pants, and can move on to the next hour worth of content, which you will then repeat dozens or hundreds of times to get the next slot machine drop.
That isn't role playing. That is gambling.
So, in effect, MMO's pull a bait-and-switch on you. You start out with the reasonable expectation that you're playing an RPG that will occupy your attention for months, if not years. Then you find out that you are being rushed through the world where the role playing might actually happen, and shoved into the grind that is "endgame" raiding. Now, you aren't playing an RPG, you are pulling a slot machine lever in the hopes that a treat will drop from the slot at the end.
Oh no, it's true that they're not synonymous with each other, I figured sarcasm because it was a completely retarded thing to assume. I thought you were being funny, but now I laugh at you instead.
This.
I am an old bastid.. been doing RPGs since the Atari was big.... When the MUDs then MMOs started showing up on PC I was all over them....now....
I avoid them for the most part as they are all the same.... sure a few mechanics are different.. but for the most part they are carbon copies. I waited for a new type of MMO... I jumped at Star Citizen at first.... im still holding out for it... but I dont think its going to be the fun PVE universe everyone is hoping for.... More a PVE universe where its alot of PVP and a lil PVE.
Then I heard about Citadel of Sorcery.. I noticed it failed in Kick starter because amateurs decided to not fund it based on pre alpha graphics... noobs lol well they come in all shapes and money brackets... so I decide to go on a limb and donated to its crowd funding.. its still going through development and the more I hear about it the more I am looking forward to it going to publisher. I really want to see it come to fruition.
If you are looking for a change to the current MMOs look at Citadel of Sorcery.. it may have the answers you are looking for in an MMO.. at worst it'll have game mechanics found no where else in the industry...
Played: UO, LotR, WoW, SWG, DDO, AoC, EVE, Warhammer, TF2, EQ2, SWTOR, TSW, CSS, KF, L4D, AoW, WoT
Playing: The Secret World until Citadel of Sorcery goes into Alpha testing.
Tired of: Linear quest games, dailies, and dumbed down games
Anticipating:Citadel of Sorcery
No one is saying that 15 - 30 minute fights cannot be challenging. Most solo fights in EQ1 could take 15 minutes to accomplish.
What older vets like myself are arguing is that we don't believe long durations = challenging. We are saying challenging back in the "golden years," usually lead to long durations. These long durations are what we cherished because all of our social bonds were created as a result.
Today's games have little or no downtime, and the challenges are overwith quickly so that there are no social bonds created as there is simply no time to create them. And that is the problem with MMOs today - they simply do not allow the community to bond because their design discourages social grouping, or even more so, the need to group at all.
EQ1 in the golden years had it right. Hopefully Pantheon brings it back.
60 minutes: Because most chicks want at least 15 min of foreplay and 4 chicks at 15 min each will leave a man painfully blue-balled.
LMFAO laugh all you want, I've been enjoying myself commenting to people that's been trying to disprove it. Won't be hurting my feelings one bit. You agree it's true, good for you.
QFT!
Rose tinted glasses like a motherfucker
Social bonds is what YOU make of it. If you can't make friends it's all on you not the game. If you require a game to help you make friends you gots problems.
As great as MMOs are, fantastic as thier potential could be, they will never ,short of a revolution in AI, be as good a play experience as PnP. They cannot craft an play experience tailored specifically to a group or player. Cooperative single player games might be able to approach that but even they fall a bit short.
This isn't a simple problem solved by simply increasing the leveling speed. I just isn't. The leveling speed of modern games is set at that pace to because it impossible to have a unique ungrindy play experience with long leveling times. EQ and the games around that time had content that was essentially camping in the exact same spots for literally days at a time, to gain one single level. It was proposterous and should have been an insult to any Pen and Paper vet.
The problem was that unlike PnP GM games, the servers were always on, players could and on average did play every night of the week for hours. You simple can't, as a developer, create that much unique content for players. You can't. In the PnP realm, you likely built a character slowly over one to two years (or more) but its not like you played 20-30 hours a week, every week. Realistically it was once or twice a week on average.
The old MMOs solved the issue in the the most direct way and simplest way. They simply added some zeros to the XP curve. Instead of killing 20-30 knolls to level now you had to kill hundreds. They made death penalties harsh enough to put you back hours of "work" should you make the slighest mistake and they had huge zones mostly filled with empty space that you had to traverse over hours to get anywhere. They also forced mandatory downtime/recovery time on the order of 5 minutes or more between fights. It was the most obvious and easiest way to solve the content issue, but there was nothing clever or revolutionary about this solution. The result was some of the most boring, agonizingly tedious "gameplay" the gaming world has ever seen. But the experience was shared and nothing like we had ever experienced before so that made it a little more tolerable. Make no mistake however, they threw fun and engaging gameplay under the bus for the sake of your long tail character development.
Newer MMOs did the opposite they sacrificed long character development for the sake of fun and engaging gameplay. They brute force created the exact amount of content to fill their levels to keep players busy to 100-200 hours and development costs soared to literally 100's of millions of dollars. While this still isn't your ideal MMORPG as least they made the effort to make your time entertaining with out resorting to intellectually lazy fix of just stretching out content by increasing xp requirements.
They did the long tail character development thing too really, but they did it at max level/raiding level. But instead of increasing the xp requirement along the leveling curve forcing you to fight hundreds of the same mob over and over, at max level they force you to fight a single boss mob, replace xp with random drop gear grinds and only ALLOW you to fight the progression mob once a week. Its the same solution just expressed in a different manner.
Funny, but I started playing MMOs at 40, had a family, job, etc with very sparse time... I'm now 50 with the same family, different job, etc with very sparse time. Only thing that is different now is the games aren't as engaging as they used to be. I mean really, if you liked the game, you'd make the time for it. I sure did back in the day. Games today just aren't worth making the time for anymore. I haven't changed as much as the games have. You change the game, you change the draw.
And let's stop with the 'vets' reference... it's not like you served in a combat zone and survived. You play video games and have played them for a while. Does going to school qualify you to be a vet of school? Having a job make you a vet of work? Sleeping every night make you a vet of sleep? Not everyone in the military is given veteran status... so merely serving doesn't give you that title. There are plenty of people who have served who are not called vets. They are merely referred to as 'retired' or 'former'. No one has earned the title 'vet' playing a video game. They just take it on to give them some sort of ego status.