I am all for a low powergap, something like 5% of the average MMO powergap would be excellent.
No powergap is another matter, particularly if you still have gear progression. I want my character to be better. Not as much as going from peasant to demi God but more like from apprentice to master.
Lower powergap but slower time to max out is what the genre needs, particularly for PvP.
I guess a PvP only game could work with no personal progression if you replace that with realm progression though, a RvR game like DaoC could still be fun without progression but then you need really good combat mechanics.
Kind of sounds like a carebear who doesn't want do the hard grind like everyone else. The reality is, if you get equal stats , the player who has bever been in the deep end, will get that much more wrecked.
End game is end game for a reason, it rewards those who have learned the mechanics and figured out the class, blaming a stat gap for poor mind set of pvp is pretty redundant.
I've complained about classes sure, but I know , it is just me who needs to "get good"
git gud
When you don't want the truth, you will make up your own truth.
I play D&D every Saturday so I think I have a clue about RPGs.
I'm so jealous you get to play D&D every Saturday. I tried to get a game going and was the DM, but my work schedule is absurd with 80 hour works weeks and being on-call and wife/kid.
One day, I'll play D&D regularly.
Cryomatrix
p.s. For people saying @eldurian doesn't want vertical progression, that is false, he states clearly, he wants vertical progression with a much lower slope . Hence, the stat gap at end game isn't infinitely higher than low levels.
Catch me streaming at twitch.tv/cryomatrix You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
I play D&D every Saturday so I think I have a clue about RPGs.
I'm so jealous you get to play D&D every Saturday. I tried to get a game going and was the DM, but my work schedule is absurd with 80 hour works weeks and being on-call and wife/kid.
One day, I'll play D&D regularly.
Cryomatrix
p.s. For people saying @eldurian doesn't want vertical progression, that is false, he states clearly, he wants vertical progression with a much lower slope . Hence, the stat gap at end game isn't infinitely higher than low levels.
That's actually not entirely true though I appreciate the sentiment.
Basically I state anything between 0-500% is fine with me and I consider anything greater to be excessive.
0% is obviously something that needs additional systems. For instance shifting progression over to housing and territorial control, allowing the player to hunt down additional skills that can be swapped out for older ones and open up new potential builds that are not definitively stronger. I do believe in it's ability to work but I also believe that to a certain degree telling many on these boards that an MMO can work with 0 vertical character progression is like telling someone who's only seen muskets that a gun can work without a ramrod. They'll have to see it to understand.
500% would just need to be scaled appropriately and not require much further change to work though. I really don't think most people really care that much HOW high the numbers go up as long as they can say "Hah! I'm higher level than you!!!"
For MMO I think the best system I've seen is something similar to SWG pre-NGE - there are some leveling, the key is not so much the leveling but how you combine the professions to create synergy for how you want to play; and you can change it and retrain to a different combination if you want to.
Items are perm decay but slowly, so keeps crafting professions important, which in turn keeps political professions important because good crafting requires good supporting community, and make the game economy and community feels alive. Where players ended up actually fulfilling their "roles" in the game universe instead of fulfilling just the power requirement of the game.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I play D&D every Saturday so I think I have a clue about RPGs.
I'm so jealous you get to play D&D every Saturday. I tried to get a game going and was the DM, but my work schedule is absurd with 80 hour works weeks and being on-call and wife/kid.
One day, I'll play D&D regularly.
Cryomatrix
p.s. For people saying @eldurian doesn't want vertical progression, that is false, he states clearly, he wants vertical progression with a much lower slope . Hence, the stat gap at end game isn't infinitely higher than low levels.
That's actually not entirely true though I appreciate the sentiment.
Basically I state anything between 0-500% is fine with me and I consider anything greater to be excessive.
0% is obviously something that needs additional systems. For instance shifting progression over to housing and territorial control, allowing the player to hunt down additional skills that can be swapped out for older ones and open up new potential builds that are not definitively stronger. I do believe in it's ability to work but I also believe that to a certain degree telling many on these boards that an MMO can work with 0 vertical character progression is like telling someone who's only seen muskets that a gun can work without a ramrod. They'll have to see it to understand.
500% would just need to be scaled appropriately and not require much further change to work though. I really don't think most people really care that much HOW high the numbers go up as long as they can say "Hah! I'm higher level than you!!!"
It could work. I just doubt it would be popular enough to warrant investors putting money towards the idea. Maybe as a "also, we don't have heavy vertical progression," but not as a primary selling point. It's not as large an issue for MMORPG gamers as you seem to imply.
Additionally, it's already been mentioned that other systems can give you the best of both worlds; progression and equalization in situations where you don't want gear to prevent a certain activity or govern the outcome. Trying to balance purely horizontal progression among players is tougher than merely tuning their stats in general up and down to eliminate any detrimental effects stats disparities have between players.
MMO lovers are a shrinking demographic and within current MMO fans I would agree that not that many people care.
I think you would discover were a game like this well made and marketed, for every 1 gamer in the MMO industry who wants a low power gap there are multiple who left the MMO industry because of the power gap.
Saving the MMO industry at this point means drawing in a bunch of people who aren't current MMO fans. So I think in general advertising I actually would make it a primary selling point. While in advertising specifically within the MMO industry I'd focus on other points.
In terms of if we were talking about my ideal MMO, I would make a big selling point inside the current MMO fanbase that no dungeon ever plays out exactly the same way twice, and that because of it we'd be introducing roles like trap finding/disarming etc. back into the skillsets of a well rounded dungeon party.
MMO lovers are a shrinking demographic and within current MMO fans I would agree that not that many people care.
I think you would discover were a game like this well made and marketed, for every 1 gamer in the MMO industry who wants a low power gap there are multiple who left the MMO industry because of the power gap.
Saving the MMO industry at this point means drawing in a bunch of people who aren't current MMO fans. So I think in general advertising I actually would make it a primary selling point. While in advertising specifically within the MMO industry I'd focus on other points.
In terms of if we were talking about my ideal MMO, I would make a big selling point inside the current MMO fanbase that no dungeon ever plays out exactly the same way twice, and that because of it we'd be introducing roles like trap finding/disarming etc. back into the skillsets of a well rounded dungeon party.
Saving the MMO industry as it stands is a fool's errand, in my opinion. It was niche when it began, one flash in the pan made it all the rage temporarily, now that's faded. Trying to sustain that level of success for the genre here in the west isn't feasible.
For me, the concept of an MMO was not something I was first introduced to through hearing about or playing an MMO. Rather, the concept I had in my head for the next generation of games I wanted to play were all MMOs for the most part. I just didn't have a name for them.
That makes me really question this assertion "MMOs are a niche genre!" I think the idea of games being massively multiplayer in nature is a much more engaging and enduring concept than people might assume. But I think it's a concept that has only had about 1% of it's potential explored by serious game development companies.
Then again, if you consider a game like PUBG, it drops 100 players on the map at once and pits them in a deathmatch against each other. So while it's not really capturing what I look for in MMOs, I would say it's exploring one potential aspect of the potential of massively multiplayer games outside the traditional MMO space.
So maybe we won't see MMO developers explore the idea of making other game concepts more massive. Maybe we will see developers in other genres explore the idea of making their own genre more massive.
I have just seen this post because I haven't gamed or spent much time on gaming for years. I completely agree with the OP you posted, Eldurian. The boredom of the levelling rat race and all the crazy attempts to address the obvious problems while ignoring the obvious answer has made my interest in games very low.
I have dreamed of a game world that's freed from the confines of the level structures. Where resources are directed at worldly interaction and AI that defies prediction, and where what's over the next hill can be different at any time, based on what is happening in a live world.
Clearly you will have to wait until 2045 to be a part of OASIS.
It could be done right now, if someone actually wanted to do it and had typical AAA financing (even less, but it would require more than typical indie money for sure).
That's actually not entirely true though I appreciate the sentiment.
Basically I state anything between 0-500% is fine with me and I consider anything greater to be excessive.
0% is obviously something that needs additional systems. For instance shifting progression over to housing and territorial control, allowing the player to hunt down additional skills that can be swapped out for older ones and open up new potential builds that are not definitively stronger. I do believe in it's ability to work but I also believe that to a certain degree telling many on these boards that an MMO can work with 0 vertical character progression is like telling someone who's only seen muskets that a gun can work without a ramrod. They'll have to see it to understand.
500% would just need to be scaled appropriately and not require much further change to work though. I really don't think most people really care that much HOW high the numbers go up as long as they can say "Hah! I'm higher level than you!!!"
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Personally do I think 200% would be better if you have a PvP game while up to 500% would work if you have a PvE focused game.
The complex idea is "One person should not be stronger than 5 based on differences in character stats alone."
Obviously achieving that objective is more than just a difference between 100 health and 500 health If you scale only health and don't adjust things like damage, attack rate, movement speed, crowd control, armor etc. you'll end up with a character far weaker than 5 characters without the scaled health. If you scale all those things up to 500% as well then you will have a character far stronger than 5 characters without scaled stats. So obviously you need to account for all advantages offered by leveling as a whole and do some fine adjustment based on complex math and rigorous testing.
But I use 500% to quickly convey the idea of "One person should not be stronger than 5 based on differences in character stats alone" in a way people hopefully understand.
The masses are aleady playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period.
So why is it that FPS games seem to be getting progressively more massive? When I was young and first doing FPS games we played Golden-Eye on splitscreen.
When I got older I was doing 16 man Halo matches online.
Now the most popular only FPS takes 100 players, dumps them on a map, and shrinks the size of the play area until they are all dead.
Perhaps people actually enjoy the "massive" aspect of MMOs, and dislike all the baggage that's been attached to that term.
The masses are aleady playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period.
This is only a battleground. We are talking about MMORPG.
There is no point in making a MMO where evrybody has the same power. There has been some attempts of implementing this idea all them crashed and burned.
The masses are aleady playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period.
So why is it that FPS games seem to be getting progressively more massive? When I was young and first doing FPS games we played Golden-Eye on splitscreen.
When I got older I was doing 16 man Halo matches online.
Now the most popular only FPS takes 100 players, dumps them on a map, and shrinks the size of the play area until they are all dead.
Perhaps people actually enjoy the "massive" aspect of MMOs, and dislike all the baggage that's been attached to that term.
I think you may be conflating things here. I would love to have a WWII MMOFPS with no progression. That has nothing to do with my enjoyment of an MMORPG.
The reason that WWII MMOFPS hasn't been realized has little to do with previous preferences for smaller PvP; it's technical limitations with having that many players using hit scan or projectile attacks in the same game space.
If they had the tech, we likely would've had many MMOFPSs, because there's a huge consumer base for widescale war action, not because MMORPGs are a flawed product that should die in their current form.
The masses are aleady playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period.
This is only a battleground. We are talking about MMORPG.
There is no point in making a MMO where evrybody has the same power. There has been some attempts of implementing this idea all them crashed and burned.
I'm here from 1902 to inform you all that every attempt to make an aircraft has crashed and burned. It's a horrible idea, will never catch on.
Name a single project that has attempted this with the same budget as a single successful theme park.
Indie projects working on a shoestring budget are pretty much the only place anything other than WoW clones have been attempted in the MMO sphere.
Maybe, just maybe, underfunded indie projects made by ameteur developers fail because they are underfunded indie projects made by ameteur developers and not because some of the visonary concepts they explore in their games were inherently flawed.
The masses are aleady playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period.
This is only a battleground. We are talking about MMORPG.
There is no point in making a MMO where evrybody has the same power. There has been some attempts of implementing this idea all them crashed and burned.
I'm here from 1902 to inform you all that every attempt to make an aircraft has crashed and burned. It's a horrible idea, will never catch on.
Name a single project that has attempted this with the same budget as a single successful theme park.
Indie projects working on a shoestring budget are pretty much the only place anything other than WoW clones have been attempted in the MMO sphere.
Maybe, just maybe, underfunded indie projects made by ameteur developers fail because they are underfunded indie projects made by ameteur developers and not because some of the visonary concepts they explore in their games were inherently flawed.
The MMO hype wave is long over, no western developer is willing to throw dozens of millions of dollars and spend years developing an MMO anymore. Even Blizzard gave up.
The masses are aleady playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period.
So why is it that FPS games seem to be getting progressively more massive? When I was young and first doing FPS games we played Golden-Eye on splitscreen.
When I got older I was doing 16 man Halo matches online.
Now the most popular only FPS takes 100 players, dumps them on a map, and shrinks the size of the play area until they are all dead.
Perhaps people actually enjoy the "massive" aspect of MMOs, and dislike all the baggage that's been attached to that term.
I think you may be conflating things here. I would love to have a WWII MMOFPS with no progression. That has nothing to do with my enjoyment of an MMORPG.
The reason that WWII MMOFPS hasn't been realized has little to do with previous preferences for smaller PvP; it's technical limitations with having that many players using hit scan or projectile attacks in the same game space.
If they had the tech, we likely would've had many MMOFPSs, because there's a huge consumer base for widescale war action, not because MMORPGs are a flawed product that should die in their current form.
That's not what's being argued. What Kabulozo is saying is MMOs are dead. And not in the sense that I frequently say it, that this genre is dying and is in need of change if it's going to turn things around. In the sense that all MMOs are dead forever and there will be no resurgence at any point.
If a WWII MMOFPS with no progression were to catch on then what he said:
"The masses are already playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period."
Would be proven wrong.
So I think it's worth pointing out that other genres become more massive as technology allows. Because the people want massive. They just don't want WoW.
The masses are aleady playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period.
So why is it that FPS games seem to be getting progressively more massive? When I was young and first doing FPS games we played Golden-Eye on splitscreen.
When I got older I was doing 16 man Halo matches online.
Now the most popular only FPS takes 100 players, dumps them on a map, and shrinks the size of the play area until they are all dead.
Perhaps people actually enjoy the "massive" aspect of MMOs, and dislike all the baggage that's been attached to that term.
I think you may be conflating things here. I would love to have a WWII MMOFPS with no progression. That has nothing to do with my enjoyment of an MMORPG.
The reason that WWII MMOFPS hasn't been realized has little to do with previous preferences for smaller PvP; it's technical limitations with having that many players using hit scan or projectile attacks in the same game space.
If they had the tech, we likely would've had many MMOFPSs, because there's a huge consumer base for widescale war action, not because MMORPGs are a flawed product that should die in their current form.
That's not what's being argued. What Kabulozo is saying is MMOs are dead. And not in the sense that I frequently say it, that this genre is dying and is in need of change if it's going to turn things around. In the sense that all MMOs are dead forever and there will be no resurgence at any point.
If a WWII MMOFPS with no progression were to catch on then what he said:
"The masses are already playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period."
Would be proven wrong.
So I think it's worth pointing out that other genres become more massive as technology allows. Because the people want massive. They just don't want WoW.
Again, not sure that's true. I would play both WoW and the MMOFPS described. The consumer base isn't so segregated. Many of my college friends played WoW, but also played CoD and Battlefield, Dragon Age... Nothing about traditional MMORPGs dying by either definition will necessarily bring you the MMOxxx game you're wanting.
However, I do agree that until we see some of these mediocre as hell entries die out, you won't get any more major investor interest to try anything in this genre. Unfortunately, the nature of F2P monetization is preventing these games from dying when they should based on their merits, because they need only retain a core group of whales to make their nut, they can survive with everyone else merely dabbling and making a purchase here or there.
If you are think of a next "big expensive AAA subscription MMO" it won't happen anymore, at least in west. Devs now want to make money out of cheaper online games where players can join, have a blast and buy skins through microtansactions.
The only companies still developing multi million AAA MMOs are either Korean or Chinese companies. But the trend over there is Mobile MMOs dominating the space, look at Lineage M success over Korea.
Basically, what @eldurian ; is saying is to minimize the discrepancy seen in stat gaps.
I think that is a great idea.
Cryomatrix
Right. I'll give a great example of this.
In Lord of The Rings Online I made a hobbit character. I really wanted to immerse myself in the character so I did every single quest in the Shire. Completely explored the zone, if they had zone based achievements at the time I would have like 100% Shire completion.
By the time I left the zone I was one shotting everything and gaining no XP from anything I did.
It felt more like a punishment that a reward and totally broke immersion. I can only imagine what it would have been like if I had max leveled a character then decided to go back and do the Shire quests.
I think progression is more important in a PVE centric game than a PVP one, but even in a PVE one I want to feel like hero instead of a god.
Soo... you realize you can just turn off XP in LOTRO
Comments
No powergap is another matter, particularly if you still have gear progression. I want my character to be better. Not as much as going from peasant to demi God but more like from apprentice to master.
Lower powergap but slower time to max out is what the genre needs, particularly for PvP.
I guess a PvP only game could work with no personal progression if you replace that with realm progression though, a RvR game like DaoC could still be fun without progression but then you need really good combat mechanics.
When you don't want the truth, you will make up your own truth.
One day, I'll play D&D regularly.
Cryomatrix
p.s. For people saying @eldurian doesn't want vertical progression, that is false, he states clearly, he wants vertical progression with a much lower slope
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Basically I state anything between 0-500% is fine with me and I consider anything greater to be excessive.
0% is obviously something that needs additional systems. For instance shifting progression over to housing and territorial control, allowing the player to hunt down additional skills that can be swapped out for older ones and open up new potential builds that are not definitively stronger. I do believe in it's ability to work but I also believe that to a certain degree telling many on these boards that an MMO can work with 0 vertical character progression is like telling someone who's only seen muskets that a gun can work without a ramrod. They'll have to see it to understand.
500% would just need to be scaled appropriately and not require much further change to work though. I really don't think most people really care that much HOW high the numbers go up as long as they can say "Hah! I'm higher level than you!!!"
Items are perm decay but slowly, so keeps crafting professions important, which in turn keeps political professions important because good crafting requires good supporting community, and make the game economy and community feels alive. Where players ended up actually fulfilling their "roles" in the game universe instead of fulfilling just the power requirement of the game.
Its had me rethinking my position on the matter, and cheering or booing both sides of the debate.
@Eldurian just made a great point in his muskets vs guns analogy, I'm going to have to see it work to really be convinced.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Additionally, it's already been mentioned that other systems can give you the best of both worlds; progression and equalization in situations where you don't want gear to prevent a certain activity or govern the outcome. Trying to balance purely horizontal progression among players is tougher than merely tuning their stats in general up and down to eliminate any detrimental effects stats disparities have between players.
I think you would discover were a game like this well made and marketed, for every 1 gamer in the MMO industry who wants a low power gap there are multiple who left the MMO industry because of the power gap.
Saving the MMO industry at this point means drawing in a bunch of people who aren't current MMO fans. So I think in general advertising I actually would make it a primary selling point. While in advertising specifically within the MMO industry I'd focus on other points.
In terms of if we were talking about my ideal MMO, I would make a big selling point inside the current MMO fanbase that no dungeon ever plays out exactly the same way twice, and that because of it we'd be introducing roles like trap finding/disarming etc. back into the skillsets of a well rounded dungeon party.
That makes me really question this assertion "MMOs are a niche genre!" I think the idea of games being massively multiplayer in nature is a much more engaging and enduring concept than people might assume. But I think it's a concept that has only had about 1% of it's potential explored by serious game development companies.
Then again, if you consider a game like PUBG, it drops 100 players on the map at once and pits them in a deathmatch against each other. So while it's not really capturing what I look for in MMOs, I would say it's exploring one potential aspect of the potential of massively multiplayer games outside the traditional MMO space.
So maybe we won't see MMO developers explore the idea of making other game concepts more massive. Maybe we will see developers in other genres explore the idea of making their own genre more massive.
Once upon a time....
Personally do I think 200% would be better if you have a PvP game while up to 500% would work if you have a PvE focused game.
Anyways, I agree with you.
The complex idea is "One person should not be stronger than 5 based on differences in character stats alone."
Obviously achieving that objective is more than just a difference between 100 health and 500 health If you scale only health and don't adjust things like damage, attack rate, movement speed, crowd control, armor etc. you'll end up with a character far weaker than 5 characters without the scaled health. If you scale all those things up to 500% as well then you will have a character far stronger than 5 characters without scaled stats. So obviously you need to account for all advantages offered by leveling as a whole and do some fine adjustment based on complex math and rigorous testing.
But I use 500% to quickly convey the idea of "One person should not be stronger than 5 based on differences in character stats alone" in a way people hopefully understand.
When I got older I was doing 16 man Halo matches online.
Now the most popular only FPS takes 100 players, dumps them on a map, and shrinks the size of the play area until they are all dead.
Perhaps people actually enjoy the "massive" aspect of MMOs, and dislike all the baggage that's been attached to that term.
The reason that WWII MMOFPS hasn't been realized has little to do with previous preferences for smaller PvP; it's technical limitations with having that many players using hit scan or projectile attacks in the same game space.
If they had the tech, we likely would've had many MMOFPSs, because there's a huge consumer base for widescale war action, not because MMORPGs are a flawed product that should die in their current form.
Name a single project that has attempted this with the same budget as a single successful theme park.
Indie projects working on a shoestring budget are pretty much the only place anything other than WoW clones have been attempted in the MMO sphere.
Maybe, just maybe, underfunded indie projects made by ameteur developers fail because they are underfunded indie projects made by ameteur developers and not because some of the visonary concepts they explore in their games were inherently flawed.
If a WWII MMOFPS with no progression were to catch on then what he said:
"The masses are already playing battle royales for 100% fair, skill based gameplay. They won't flock to MMOs. Period."
Would be proven wrong.
So I think it's worth pointing out that other genres become more massive as technology allows. Because the people want massive. They just don't want WoW.
However, I do agree that until we see some of these mediocre as hell entries die out, you won't get any more major investor interest to try anything in this genre. Unfortunately, the nature of F2P monetization is preventing these games from dying when they should based on their merits, because they need only retain a core group of whales to make their nut, they can survive with everyone else merely dabbling and making a purchase here or there.
The only companies still developing multi million AAA MMOs are either Korean or Chinese companies. But the trend over there is Mobile MMOs dominating the space, look at Lineage M success over Korea.