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I will not play an MMORPG if:
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,499
1) I'll have to buy random boxes with real money to enjoy the game.
Random boxes that are easily ignored are not a problem. Needing a few things from random boxes that I can buy off of other players rather than having to open the boxes myself is undesirable, but depending on prices, not automatically a deal-breaker.
2) I can't figure out how a game hopes to make money.
I want a game's business model to be clear up front. I'm willing to pay a moderate amount for games I like, but not willing to jump in and find out how much it costs later. This does rule out a lot of early access and betas, but not so many actual released games.
3) Success in the game is mostly determined by whoever pays the most wins.
I have no problem with someone who pays $15/month having huge advantages over someone who pays nothing. If someone who pays $50/month can't compete with someone who pays $100/month, the game has a problem.
4) The game has a strong real-life time-of-day dependence.
It's expected that the number of players online will fluctuate with the time of day, so having some minor time-of-day dependence is often unavoidable. But if playing an hour at one time of day tends to progress you three times as fast as playing an hour at a different time of day, that's a problem. This isn't a common problem, but it does occasionally show up.
5) I'd have to schedule my life around a game to be competitive.
This pretty much rules out guild raiding, for example. There are plenty of things in life that I have to do at particular times for various reasons. Computer games shouldn't add to the list. Most games manage to avoid this pretty well, but some don't, and that's a deal-breaker for me.
6) The game has classes, but won't let me play them all.
This is the primary reason why I never tried EverQuest II. A lot of games put in features to be alt-friendly; Cryptic and ArenaNet are notably good about this. I'm fine with switching classes on a single character, as in FFXIV or Trove. I'm also fine with having a bunch of independent characters. But I'm not fine with their being a bunch of classes and me being expected to pick one and stick with it. I've never seen a game that had any good gameplay reason to do this; it's usually just sloppy design when games go that route. I realize that this is an unusual preference, but my preferences are what they are.
7) I can't find much information on what a game is like.
If you click on a lot of ads on this site, they take you to a page that asks you to register but tells you basically nothing about a game. I find that completely baffling. Some have links to a game's main page. Sometimes you can shorten the URL to get to a game's main page. But some game sites offer so egregiously little information about a game as to make me wonder if it's not a real game, but only trying to harvest personal information or get you to install malware or some such.
Bigger budget games are often better about explaining what a game is like than smaller budget games, but there are many exceptions. Vanguard and Elder Scrolls Online offered ridiculously little explanation of the game on their site. Vanguard's site was actually so bad that, two years after the game launched, digging through the site left me with the impression that not only was the game not out, but it wouldn't be anytime soon. Wikis can sometimes fill this void, but if you're relying purely on your players to tell other players about your game, someone at the company isn't doing his job.
8) I expect to be ganked a lot with no real way to fight back.
Non-consensual PVP is not automatically a deal-breaker, but there have to be some pretty harsh limits on it. Uncharted Waters Online and Puzzle Pirates both had this, and I liked both games. But there's an enormous difference between getting attacked once every ten hours of gameplay and once every ten minutes. There's also an enormous difference between usually being able to flee if attacked and not really being able to do anything besides die.
9) The game requires heavy mouse usage.
Light mouse usage to occasionally navigate menus while otherwise using a keyboard or gamepad is not a problem. Even a pure mouse game like Hearthstone is fine if it doesn't require that heavy of interaction from the player.
The problem is that I use a computer all day at work. If I come home and heavily use a mouse to play games, that's a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen. I'm not willing to give up my day job in favor of something that doesn't involve computers, so I need games to work around that. I can work around a lot by using a gamepad, but this does rule out heavily clicking on very precise areas of the screen. Click to move is often a problem. Having to click on something to shoot it is often a big problem. Mouse aiming that is pretty forgiving on what you're aiming at, such as in Neverwinter, is fine.
10) The game requires playing in long, contiguous blocks of time.
If I have to log on and play for three hours continuously to play a game, I'm not going to play that game. That doesn't mean that I won't play three hours in a day, at least if I'm not otherwise busy that day. It means that I want to break it up in chunks of an hour here and half an hour there.
I'd really like to be able to log off at almost any time without losing progress. Uncharted Waters Online is especially good about this. Needing to take ten minutes to finish an instance or dungeon or quest or whatever is okay, too. Needing to take two hours to finish or else lose a bunch of progress is not okay.
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I'm not demanding that all games be changed to cater to my preferences. Number (9) especially is a personal preference that most gamers don't share.
Is it unreasonable to list so many things that are a deal-breaker for me? I don't think so, considering that I still manage to find plenty of MMORPGs that I like. The people who can't find any games at all that they like are the ones who are being unreasonable.
Random boxes that are easily ignored are not a problem. Needing a few things from random boxes that I can buy off of other players rather than having to open the boxes myself is undesirable, but depending on prices, not automatically a deal-breaker.
2) I can't figure out how a game hopes to make money.
I want a game's business model to be clear up front. I'm willing to pay a moderate amount for games I like, but not willing to jump in and find out how much it costs later. This does rule out a lot of early access and betas, but not so many actual released games.
3) Success in the game is mostly determined by whoever pays the most wins.
I have no problem with someone who pays $15/month having huge advantages over someone who pays nothing. If someone who pays $50/month can't compete with someone who pays $100/month, the game has a problem.
4) The game has a strong real-life time-of-day dependence.
It's expected that the number of players online will fluctuate with the time of day, so having some minor time-of-day dependence is often unavoidable. But if playing an hour at one time of day tends to progress you three times as fast as playing an hour at a different time of day, that's a problem. This isn't a common problem, but it does occasionally show up.
5) I'd have to schedule my life around a game to be competitive.
This pretty much rules out guild raiding, for example. There are plenty of things in life that I have to do at particular times for various reasons. Computer games shouldn't add to the list. Most games manage to avoid this pretty well, but some don't, and that's a deal-breaker for me.
6) The game has classes, but won't let me play them all.
This is the primary reason why I never tried EverQuest II. A lot of games put in features to be alt-friendly; Cryptic and ArenaNet are notably good about this. I'm fine with switching classes on a single character, as in FFXIV or Trove. I'm also fine with having a bunch of independent characters. But I'm not fine with their being a bunch of classes and me being expected to pick one and stick with it. I've never seen a game that had any good gameplay reason to do this; it's usually just sloppy design when games go that route. I realize that this is an unusual preference, but my preferences are what they are.
7) I can't find much information on what a game is like.
If you click on a lot of ads on this site, they take you to a page that asks you to register but tells you basically nothing about a game. I find that completely baffling. Some have links to a game's main page. Sometimes you can shorten the URL to get to a game's main page. But some game sites offer so egregiously little information about a game as to make me wonder if it's not a real game, but only trying to harvest personal information or get you to install malware or some such.
Bigger budget games are often better about explaining what a game is like than smaller budget games, but there are many exceptions. Vanguard and Elder Scrolls Online offered ridiculously little explanation of the game on their site. Vanguard's site was actually so bad that, two years after the game launched, digging through the site left me with the impression that not only was the game not out, but it wouldn't be anytime soon. Wikis can sometimes fill this void, but if you're relying purely on your players to tell other players about your game, someone at the company isn't doing his job.
8) I expect to be ganked a lot with no real way to fight back.
Non-consensual PVP is not automatically a deal-breaker, but there have to be some pretty harsh limits on it. Uncharted Waters Online and Puzzle Pirates both had this, and I liked both games. But there's an enormous difference between getting attacked once every ten hours of gameplay and once every ten minutes. There's also an enormous difference between usually being able to flee if attacked and not really being able to do anything besides die.
9) The game requires heavy mouse usage.
Light mouse usage to occasionally navigate menus while otherwise using a keyboard or gamepad is not a problem. Even a pure mouse game like Hearthstone is fine if it doesn't require that heavy of interaction from the player.
The problem is that I use a computer all day at work. If I come home and heavily use a mouse to play games, that's a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen. I'm not willing to give up my day job in favor of something that doesn't involve computers, so I need games to work around that. I can work around a lot by using a gamepad, but this does rule out heavily clicking on very precise areas of the screen. Click to move is often a problem. Having to click on something to shoot it is often a big problem. Mouse aiming that is pretty forgiving on what you're aiming at, such as in Neverwinter, is fine.
10) The game requires playing in long, contiguous blocks of time.
If I have to log on and play for three hours continuously to play a game, I'm not going to play that game. That doesn't mean that I won't play three hours in a day, at least if I'm not otherwise busy that day. It means that I want to break it up in chunks of an hour here and half an hour there.
I'd really like to be able to log off at almost any time without losing progress. Uncharted Waters Online is especially good about this. Needing to take ten minutes to finish an instance or dungeon or quest or whatever is okay, too. Needing to take two hours to finish or else lose a bunch of progress is not okay.
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I'm not demanding that all games be changed to cater to my preferences. Number (9) especially is a personal preference that most gamers don't share.
Is it unreasonable to list so many things that are a deal-breaker for me? I don't think so, considering that I still manage to find plenty of MMORPGs that I like. The people who can't find any games at all that they like are the ones who are being unreasonable.
Comments
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
- Albert Einstein
When I hear a game is from Korea, I know it's going to be a pay2win cash shop failure.
Lately, I've been playing Elsword and Trove. In recent years, I've also played Champions Online, Neverwinter, Guild Wars 2, Spiral Knights, Uncharted Waters Online, Hearthstone, TERA, Final Fantasy XIV, and possibly some others that don't come to mind off the top of my head. Going back further, there have been other games that I played before that.
This is why I prefer sub games, I pay my sub, I get access to the whole game. I hate the nickle and dime approach.
Should a game offer a fully functional UI? Yes I think it should, so I don't like being asked to pay for hotbars. Is that entitlement or expecting a functioning game?
What if a game forced you to walk and wanted cash to unlock the ability to run? Entitled or reasonable to expect to be able to run? Let's go from the sublime to the rediculous. Run up to a mob and find you can't attack it, you have to pay cash to use the attack button. Entitled or reasonable? I'm talking about basic game functionality.
Do you not think there is a reasonable level of expectation of what a game should provide before asking for money if the game is free to play? Most of them get it right, some don't.
I'm quite happy to pay for things, provided I get a reasonable standard to start with. How is that entitled? Is it too much to ask for a working game and then pay for extras or premium time or a sub?
[mod edit]
I will not play an MMORPG if:
it's not released.
Actually, Trove is so open-ended that you could argue that you don't actually need to buy anything to play. Getting access to all of the classes is critical to me, but you can get that with cubits and not real money. Not that I'd have a problem with it if it took a modest amount of real money to get all of the classes.
1. 10 dollar buy and lifetime subscription
2. Cost none after 10 Dollar
3. No Item Mall
4. Most areas are soloable
5. Don't need to schedule, however if u need help at some certain spot then yeah. But in most case, dont need to.
6. Asheron's call provide no class, they are skill based.. you build what u want for ur character.
7. No ads. Have huge wiki and guide database for everything in this game.
8. You can expect gank but u still can escape if you have the skill.
9. You can play the game with keyboard only.
10. No time limit.
Kain_Dale
If you don't like the quest quills and arrows, disable them. If you want to do content you out leveled you can mentor down and still make it challenging. You can turn off experience and never level if that is the way you want to play it.
I think there are some 8000 quests now, 400 collections 1200 exploration points, book quests 350 alternate skill points to earn and MORE.
If you are interested in making a MMO maybe visit my page to get a free open source engine.
To give an example of what I'm not okay with, when I looked into it, EverQuest II had 24 classes. You were capped at 5 or so characters per account, with the ability to buy a few more so that you could have up to 8 or something. I could have played all classes by having several accounts, but then paying several subscriptions gets really expensive, really fast.
Or, for another example, Age of Wushu has 8 classes, but only one character per account. You can make multiple accounts, but that would get expensive and fast. Some games even do this and try to say that you can't make multiple accounts.
But a lot depends on the nature of the game and the business model. If you have to have multiple accounts to play multiple characters but splitting time among multiple accounts isn't terribly expensive, I'm okay with that. I made three accounts to play Wakfu for a while, before giving up on the game as too grindy--but not too expensive. (Actually, as Wakfu doesn't accept any of the common methods of online payments, I had no way to pay for the game at all outside of some ridiculous work-arounds.) I made two accounts for Wizard 101, but two linked subscriptions is $14/month (total, not each), which is reasonable.
I will not play an MMORPG if it is not fun.
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Even today, an account gets 7 character slots. There are 25 classes. So that would take 4 accounts to play all of them--at a subscription price tag of $60/month. Non-subscription accounts can't sell or mail stuff, which would be a problem for me, as I routinely need to pass stuff back and forth among my characters.
When I looked into EQ2, there was a sharp limit on how many character slots you could buy on a given account. Now it looks like there isn't, but slots cost $10 each. So that's $180 for 18 slots that I'd have to pay early on for a game that I might not even like.
For a game that I thought looked super awesome, I might pay that. Maybe. But for a game that looks kind of "meh" and at best might be reasonably good but nowhere near great? Nope. Not when there are other games that I can play much cheaper than that and probably like them better, too.
If I'm wrong about the price of character slots or there is some other, easy way to get all of the slots I want, then do let me know. I like to always have a queue of games to pick up after I tire of whatever I'm playing at the time. All I've got on my list at the moment is returning to Neverwinter and GW2 at some point--and the second time I play a game rarely lasts nearly as long as the first.
been doing this since GW2 and it has saved me some money.
best thing i ever did was buy 7days to die, logged in with a can of beans some water and no idea wtf to do. was so awesome figuring the game out. being able to just do anything i want, build anything i want, kill anything i want.
instead of the " go kill 20 rats " then after that " go get 10 rat tails " then after that " go kill rat king " lol so stupid.