Unlockypoo?Follow

Indeed... when you're talking about "youngbloods" now, you're mostly talking about the free-to-play or buy-to-play crowd exemplified by Guild Wars 2.

WoW is almost 9 years old now, FFXI is 11 years old. Even though WoW represents a paradigm shift in the MMO genre, these two games are pretty bloody close to each other in terms of age.

Wow, I turn away for a couple of hours and this thread just a'sploded.

WoW is (hate to say it) a perfect example of how revolution rather than evolution can work out. No, WoW didn't entirely reinvent the wheel, but it did rapidly move towards providing an entirely different experience. The difference between adaption and evolution seems apt: WoW was a revolution that now adapts to the changing needs of the market. However, there are certain things that WoW will simply never be able to do because of its foundation. A game's foundation is extremely important. It determines what the game can do as the years drag on. And people are right to be worried when they notice that XIV's foundation is pretty similar to WoW's. If the best your foundation allows you to do is eventually catch up to the WoW legacy, you better hope there are a lot of players who hunger for some WoW-style gameplay outside of playing WoW.

Oh crap, does that mean pandas are coming in a future expansion?

No, no. Wint, you need to think within the realms of Final Fantasy lore. What species is out there in the series that no one would expect, but would geek out over if they appeared as a playable race?

The answer?

SpoilerHummingways!

@Ostia ... Tomorrow I will respond your post. You bring up many good points and I want to respond appropriately when I'm not nearly asleep.

@Bali I would have to say there is in fact a gearing system that's fair. FFXIs for example was fair. Players that work their butts off every day will have better gear than casual players. That's how it should be!

Gearing was done well but it got stagnant after a while. That's a direct result of the level cap not being raised until the last few years. Wow only has that regearing because new content gets released and the level caps go up. It's a different model, sure, but that doesn't make it a bad one. You do new dungeons and tackle new challenges instead of wait in line for your nth Kirin kill or whatever.

An endless cycle of new zones, quests, instances and raids (and the stories and lore that comes with it) is somehow a bad thing? I dunno - not sure I can really get on board with you there. Every couple of years I kind of like something new to explore and conquer. Otherwise, won't I just go to another game instead of doing Sky for the nth time? Eventually that's what happened. You can only add so many sidegrades to a character before you start to run out of patience... and inventory space.

I also don't agree that the best end game gear should lie with crafters. What's the point of killing that big bad dragon if not to rummage through all that juicy treasure you just KNOW he's sitting on? Battles for the sake of battles or story are fun, until the first time you defeat the boss. And unless there is some reason for you to continue to defeat that boss, you will sit around and twiddle your thumbs until something new comes along. But wait, we didn't want an endless cycle of content, right? So let's all go farm beehive chips to sell so we can get that epic gear that is only obtainable from a crafter.

I'm not sure what you are looking for here. Yea it would be great for time to stand still in exactly the place where we are most happy, but time marches forward and people get bored. An mmo isn't an offline game where you just repeat the same content over and over again, it's a living and breathing universe. I'd much rather see the game constantly challenging itself, and the players, than just freezing us in time with no progression unless it's sidegrades and then only from a crafter.

To that I agree. I think the way one obtained gear was perfect... The marginal difference between different pieces however sucked... and was a major turn-off.

It's a side effect of having such wide horizontal progression (and the ability to macro pieces of gear in and out during combat).

One of the primary reasons WoW and other MMOs are designed with tiers of endgame content and eventual increases in the level cap is to avoid this exact problem.

Moogles as a playable race? I'm down for that.

^^^^ Please for the love of god Why not gear that is absurdly hard to get due to a drop rate of 0.00001% chance BUT! Is totally USELESS! Now that's a Kicker! Why not that ?

I suggested that a couple of years ago. God, would you believe all the crying that it couldn't be done? I'd love to be able to play as a Moogle.



I don't. Horizontal progress and cosmetic options for hardcore players work great and don't put out players who aren't masochists by dangling prizes in front of them that they'll never have. Extremely amazing gear essentially makes most/all the non-amazing gear and the content associated with it obsolete.



...like this!

Why doesn't Minecraft count?



Visit any major MMO developer's official forums. Yeah, there's a good reason they don't crowdsource these things.

I'm not a big fan of the idea of speed runs being required for gear upgrades, for the simple reason that min/maxing becomes an absolutely critical component to that, and less desirable classes eventually find themselves unable to progress through no actual fault of their own.

The best gear should be obtainable through doing content. If the best gear in the game is available through crafting, then what's the content for after you've done it once?

I believe that some key pieces of gear can/should be obtainable through content, but a good chunk of the best gear should come from crafting otherwise it dimishes its' importance or relevance like it did in WoW. Considering that leveling up crafts/gathering takes substantial time, it should be rewarded accordingly.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page with semantics:

Not all crowd-sourcing is open source. Github is a perfect example of how software managers screen and implement the crowdsource solutions that they like. You have a great submission with walking penises but you don't want walking penises, you find someone to remove the walking penis code and use that version. (Though personally I think a walking penis version sounds pretty awesome.)

Crowd-sourced FUNDING is another matter altogether, e.g., Kickstarter. These players don't necessarily have any say in the development of the game; they're just voting on the concept with their dollars.

So those are the crowd-sourcing solutions I was referring to regarding taking risks with revolutionizing MMOs.

Enough videogames do get their funding via Kickstarter (including an infamous one that was shut down before the goal because it turned out to be basically bullsh*t), but yeah, it really depends on their resources. A single person or a small team can pretty easily manage a fairly simple mobile game or browser game. Your genuine $50 game for a PC/console title, or something with online multiplayer, and you really probably need to see a pretty robust team.

The way things are now, even the idea of an industry team of vets funding an MMO through Kickstarter is unlikely... you still need a very large team and a whole lot of money. Not impossible, just requiring a very particular type of game with relatively low development needs most likely. Frankly I'm not sure I'd trust a team of industry vets to make something innovative in the first place. Certainly the odds are that they won't. Young indie blood is what the market craves.

Because i said so. Fine, I'll clarify. Good AAA sandbox MMO with new tech and some kind of story and not Wolfenstein 3D graphics.





That sounded clever, but you're operating under the fallacy that the mouthbreathers on the forums are all coders/artists/level designers, and that said developer would just take any schmuck who wanted to contribute their "ideas". The guy saying "its dumb for Rangers to have unlimited arrows because its not realistic" probably isn't the guy who can code/model/texture. And if he was, I'd imagine any smart dev team would, I don't know, put recruited talent through an application/review process?

Wasteland 2 asked fans to offer their skillsets to help with the game. The devs didn't just give them the code and let them run wild with it. That would be retarded. Fans posted on the forums with their skillsets/offerings, and were plucked from the pool.

Think it through more.



I have similar concerns. I'm not much of a game designer, but I have to imagine there are ways around this. This is a less than ideal example, but a jumping puzzle is the kind of thing that would avoid min/max or class requirements.



That, good sir, is called an opinion. Kind of an outdated one too, imo. There are other ways to motivate people to do content. Making it fun is one way. Offering cosmetic rewards/titles, and/or having leaderboards. Come on, think outside the box a little.

Making the best (non-relic) gear obtainable through crafters fosters community and economy. Its an old and more sandboxy way of doing things. My question is, do people still want that? Clearly, you do not. Totally fine.

Also, this:


Edited, Jan 10th 2013 8:12am by Llester

Edited, Jan 10th 2013 8:15am by Llester

As long as it looks better than the other gear I'm fine with it!

UNLOCKYPOO!!!!

Not to mention there's nothing wrong with horizontal progression... it's more often the better approach for endgame design. It's a great way to make your content meaningful and progressively increase player flexibility, opening up new playstyles (rather than just opening up bigger numbers). The problem is when you manage that content poorly (see: FFXI).

I'm not sure it's necessarily the better approach; just a different approach. The two biggest problems I found with FFXI's horizontal progression system were equipment management and power creep.

Keeping optimal sets of gear became more and more difficult (and mathy) as time went on. This created strains on inventory space and macro space trying to manage all that gear. Situations where you'd collect the entire set of something only to use one piece of it on 21% of your spells/ws, but you'd collect the entire set so you could use the equipment storage npc, and you'd have to lug the whole thing out when you wanted that one piece you actually cared about. Furthermore FFXI's macro system allowing (and therefore requiring) individual pieces of gear to be swapped out in combat, meant that in order to stay optimal you often had to push two, three, or even four macros before you actually hit your spell/ws/ja/whatever. Extremely cumbersome and not at all intuitive.

Then you come to power creep. Every time SE released a new type of endgame content, they had to make sure there was some reason for you to do it. So there was always something in the gear you could obtain that was marginally better than whatever you had before. This again contributed to the very mathy nature of gear management. It was often not clear which piece or pieces you may want from new content that comes out, you know there are going to be upgrades in there, but it usually took a degree in advanced calculus to figure out what they were.

Now, you can easily say that a vertical progression system like WoW's swings too far in the other direction. That's totally fair. In WoW there's really no question, the gear with the higher item level is superior (with a few rare exceptions that they try not to have happen). The gear with the set bonuses is better then gear without them. There's really no thought at all that goes into gearing in that game. Get higher item level gear -> Gem, Enchant, Reforge it -> vendor the gear you had before. This is pretty simplistic.

I think what it ultimately boils down to is how much attention do you want players to focus on what they're wearing as opposed to what they're doing?

WoW has simplistic gear management, but it also has some of the best raiding in all of MMOdom right now. WoW's vertical system also has the advantage of being able to focus the players to a single tier of content, making grouping easier since you know that anyone who's ready for endgame is ready for the same endgame as everyone else at any given time.

So once again, not necessarily that one system is better than the other. It's not the system but the implementation that ultimately matters. A horizontal system can work if it's supported and managed so that the player doesn't feel like they're spending more time in MS Excel than they are playing the game. A vertical system can fail if it doesn't provide interesting content (locking players into a particular tier that happens to suck for a long period of time is no bueno).

Sure, there are potential pratfalls with any system. But the pratfall of a vertical system inherently undermines motivation, because the system invalidates previous rewards by definition. The rewards become a means rather than an end. In game design, the end is "fun" and the means are "work." The sooner your players start to feel that they're not achieving anything meaningful, they'll stop having fun.

Now, it could just be that I'm not feeling particularly creative right now... if you asked me, is there any way to make a vertical system that doesn't make previous gear entirely worthless, I might have an answer. In the past I've talked about diagonal progression systems where the two approaches are combined. That, for example, can work fine, but it's much more work from a design perspective than a more strict horizontal system.

So that's why this is a rare instance where I'll say that a horizontal approach is a better approach. Yes, equipment management and power creep can be problems, but they are problems that are easy to deal with if you are prepared for them. I had proposed an equipment management system that addressed those issues for FFXIV. Power creep is more inevitable, and for expansions, usually desirable. You just try to ensure that all of your encounters have something for the majority of players that improves their flexibility in combat even if it doesn't outright provide a definitive bonus. You have to be careful not to design many "best in slot" items.

It's really just a combination of both progression systems. Vertical progression continues to be a moving force for new content for leveling up, player abilities, etc... the things that are not "items" but remain as part of the character. Meanwhile, item-based progression remains horizontal. Items you acquire predominantly make you more flexible as opposed to more powerful across the board. It can be done the reverse way as well, where items are the impetus of vertical progression, and the character grows outwards through constantly learning new skills, but it wouldn't ring as familiar to players and is generally harder to design.

As some non-examples, merits in FFXI were not this. You specifically have to continue to raise the statistics that your players have to an extent where old content is being markedly easier than the new content. Raiding for gear in WoW is also not this. The gear provides vertical bonuses which make prior gear obsolete.

To turn a quick example, if the gear that you earned in WoW raids provided no statistical advantage over your current gear, but instead opened up new playstyles which made you more flexible, and in certain situations, more powerful (like say, as a mage, improved your wind magic independently of other types of magic), then that would be diagonal progression. This is all rather abstract and requires an understanding that horizontal progression still inherently creates a slow and linear vertical progression, which I assume you do since you recognize the problem of power creep in horizontal progression systems.

Personally I think raising statistics as the momentum for player progression is not the answer, but this approach can reconcile the two if you're determined to rely on vertical progression. Actually, the longer I think on MMORPG design, the more I think that the idea of continuous leveling up (e.g., having 50 levels instead of 10) has altogether been bad for the genre in terms of balancing content and rewarding players.