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I'm just asking, is allFollow

#77 Mar 01 2013 at 11:38 AM Rating: Good
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I think it's partly that, but I also think that it's as much a symptom of a larger issue as anything else. I think MMOs desperately need to do away with leveling systems. I wish the marketing, launch, and internal issues with FunCom weren't so bad, because I would have been interested to see where they took The Secret World.

I'm convinced that there's nothing worse for the health of a game than leveling systems, especially when paired with WoW's version of expansions, where everything old in the game becomes 100% irrelevant for anything but leveling. When a level system is in place, there's an automatic goal of reaching cap in play, with the expectation that cap is where all the fun stuff actually is. But games don't launch with most of their at-cap content, because that's what patches are for.

Leveling systems are fine in single player games, because they're used to pace players--there isn't much backtracking in most RPGs. The fact that Lulu can 1-hit KO flans with her dolls outside Besaid doesn't really mean much when you have no reason to be fighting things outside Besaid when she's that powerful.

If you remove a leveling system, then you have fundamentally removed the notion of endgame. Everything becomes content, because nothing ever stops being relevant. There's no notion that what you're doing doesn't matter, like leveling dungeons tend to feel like. When you're leveling, you tend to do whatever makes you level fastest. That generally means running a dungeon for some quests, and maybe chilling in the queue, but it's a means to an end. You're not there to do it because it's fun to do, you're there to do it because you need the experience to get the content you actually want to access.

I think it's a terrible system. That's why I've been dwelling on EVE's skill point system in this thread, because EVE has some amazing "endgame" content. It could do with a fair bit more PVE stuff (like AI-controlled dreadnaughts occasionally being an issue), but there's no lack of epic fights, because there's nothing keeping a battle of all frigates from being epic. And, every so often, you'll see something truly crazy happen, like battles with hundreds of ships, from dreadnaughts all the way down to drones.

There's clear lines of progression, because there's always something new to learn to do, which opens up new opportunities for the player, but it's fun because you never have to slog through useless content (even if it has the guise of being epic) just because you're a low level.

[EDIT]

I mean, let's face it, what good reason is there that a "level 20" character not be able to take part in a raid? The only reason they can't is because they're too weak to, and the only reason they're too weak to is because the leveling system only lets people who have treked all the way up to 90 raid. There's no super meaningful difference between a level 20 player and a level 80 one, besides what abilities they have access to (which is also just a symptom of our leveling system, since you need access to everything to be useful). The worst part is that a level 20 character can be played by someone who is super experienced and capable, and if it wasn't for the absence of a few thousand strength and a few locked abilities, they'd do just fine.

I'm tired of MMOs trying to pretend like they're doing anything but putting in one massive gating system. I think it's stupid. Just give me a freaking sandbox and let me play the game.

Edited, Mar 1st 2013 12:43pm by idiggory
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#78 Mar 01 2013 at 12:09 PM Rating: Excellent
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someproteinguy wrote:
The biggest problem I see in MMOs these days is that by the time you can put out enough content to be competitive people have already left for the newer games on the market.

If you take the time to create a 'competitive' amount of content your game will be outdated before it's released. Or you release a half-finished game and hope to slow the mass exodus with sparkles, glitter, and promises of awesomeness. Either way it's a tough gamble, the "new best thing" is always a large draw and nearly impossible to compete with really. Everyone leaves for the new game regardless and you get labelled the latest "WoW killer" that failed. Once you have that label, you're going to be hard pressed to lure back people.


I completely agree with this. Particularly for WoW players I think, who are spoiled with - what? 10 now? - years worth of development. We expect that level of Stuff To Do, and when we don't get it, we get bored quickly and become easily distracted by the next shiny thing. I think WoW earned its success, but I also think it's maintaining it as much through being established as through any special merit or creativity (even though I give Pandaria high marks for not feeling like laurel-resting the way Cata felt to me). If vanilla WoW came out today, in the form it was in at release - even assuming the graphics etc. were up to today's standards - it would fail too. Not even WoW could be the much-mythologized WoW killer.

I'm not sure any new game, right at launch, could ever capture my attention the way WoW did when I first found it. Because now there's WoW. They changed the market, and customer expectations, possibly forever. As Protein notes, even if someone has an idea that's completely fresh and revolutionary, it's difficult for them to get our attention and money long enough to be able to put it into effect. Unless maybe the somebody is Blizz, or someone like them, able and willing to take a significant loss for a long time as a gamble on a huge ROI... what's the word on this Titan thing?
#79 Mar 01 2013 at 12:25 PM Rating: Excellent
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I don't think any game can do it if they're just going to feel like WoW with a different setting. Which is really what most games have felt like. Developers keep trying to find new ways to package old systems. TOR storytelling was great, but the quests are typical MMO fare. Rift is a typical questing experience, plus rifts. GW2 removes traditional questing, but instead just bottles a bunch of quest objectives into a single quest in a small area, and removes almost all story telling from the experience as a result. TERA? Typical questing. LOTRO? Typical MMO questing.

I want to know why no one has bothered creating new systems. Why just repackage and sell the old system? It's clearly not working. Why do players need to have 12 quests in their logs just from one hub in one zone? Why don't we make quests that are more epic and more fulfilling? I don't blink an eye when I complete a quest in MMOs anymore, because I'm completing 14 of them every hour.

Actually send me on a QUEST. That word used to mean something. It has a connotation of being epic. But in modern MMOs, it just isn't. I'd much rather story telling be uncoupled from questing, and actually let the questing experience be grand again.

Honestly, I just don't see why saving someone's daughter from kobolds has to be as easy as running in, slaughtering everything I see in seconds, and clicking on them. Why can't it be more like a rescue mission in Skyrim, where I actually need to invest myself in the task at hand (and don't have 400 other objectives in that mine)?

I'm just worried that the industry is relying too much on a formula and not allowing for real creativity. That formula worked because it was the best combination anyone had found for the technologies available at the time and the needs of the community. We're long passed many of those limitations now--I want to see developers being creative again. The formula has changed. We haven't found the new formula yet. We won't until someone bothers to look.
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#80 Mar 01 2013 at 12:38 PM Rating: Excellent
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idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
leveling system blah, blah, blah...

Thing about leveling systems is that everyone knows what they are and how they work. There has to be some sort of character progression system because 1) people like building a character, and 2) you can't start someone off with a fully developed character and expect them to know what to do (think of all those Death Knights in the Hellfire dungeons for a wonderful example of this). You want something that's simple to play, but hard to master. You can give that easily through a gated system.

Not to say there aren't other options to "levels" of course. I mean in the FFX example you gave there were no levels, the sphere grid functioned as a masked leveling system of sorts. Also remember without a progression system people will skill-cap quickly. We all are only so good at video games, and don't like being reminded of that. We start hitting a brick wall and we quit. A gated system at minimum gives some of us a chance to feel like we're improving for a while. Smiley: wink
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#81 Mar 01 2013 at 1:07 PM Rating: Good
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[EDIT] Ugh, I have a problem. I'm gonna go ahead and label where I start to ramble (four paragraphs down), so no one has to read more than that if they don't want to. [EDIT] Well, at least one of the walls of text I posted in this thread was about EVE's skill system. Everything in the game has associated skills, from crafting to trading to piloting dreadnaughts. And because early levels of skills train much faster than old ones, and because it would take YEARS to learn all of them, people are constantly progressing their characters in ways that are relevant to their own interests, but they aren't completely left in the dust by people who have been playing for seven years, since getting to the point where you can do something well isn't hard--specializing and training a variety of skills are what really suck the time away.

I really don't see why that kind of system couldn't work really well in a fantasy MMO setting. I don't need to be a master swordsman, in the sense that I am a master of all sword types, to be useful fighting a dragon. I just have to be decently capable with the sufficient skills to fight a dragon. Sure, a career warrior might be able to fight well with any type of weapon, in any type of armor, with or without shields, and tailor his gear to a situation accordingly. That's awesome. But to fight a dragon, I just need to be able to use my shortsword and shield well enough that I'm not a drain on the rest of the group. If we're making a direct comparison between the two systems, in EVE that's essentially like doing dedicated skill training in one specific fitting for about one week. One week in EVE will get your skill in flying your class frigate, using your chosen weapon types, with decent efficiency with your energy source, and sufficient speed boosts, to be more than sufficiently useful to earn your place in a fleet. Your actual skill at playing will be the bigger factor.

But in EVE, if you want to be able to use turrets or missiles (and all the subcategories of those), fly different ships, operate both shields and armor defenses well, use your capacitor efficiently, fly frigates, destroyers, and cruisers, it's going to take a lot more time in training. To maximize your skills in all of these areas (or even just one specific ship fitting) is going to take quite a bit of time as well.

So you're always progressing, you're always gaining access to new and shinier things, or learning to use things even better, but because the gap between basic competence in something and mastery of it isn't huge, and because there's true variety in what you can train to use, you don't get screwed by being new or old.

[EDIT] HERE THERE BE RAMBLING:[/EDIT]

So maybe you start a new character who has default access to all the base forms of every weapon type, and basic cloth, leather, and mail armor. You don't really know what you want to do yet, so you just start training some general skills, like movement speed, swing speed, etc. These give you some baseline percentage buffs that will be useful for just about everything. And while you're training those, you work on trying things out. You discover you really like the skills that you gain access to with clubs, so you do some dedicated training in both the Blunt skill and the Club dedicated skill, just to make those better. You also find you prefer the agile dodge-based play style of leather armor to the slower, mitigation style of mail. So you train up that.

In under a week, your dual wield skill, club skill, blunt skill, leather armor, speed skill, and general one-handed skills are all high enough that, as long as you are wearing basic leather armor and using clubs, you can definitely be useful in many of the advanced combat scenarios (assuming you have the skill to back it up, which you won't if you are a new player).

After that first week that you've spent with dedicated building (because you knew enough about the game to actually aim for sufficient skills for some kind of content), you can choose to branch out to new things, specialize, or a mixture. Another week may cap out your basic club skill, bring your general blunt skill higher, and open up access to (and give a decent buff to) tier 2 leather armor. Maybe then you start working on your Mace skill, so you can gain access to the new weapon type, which has different strengths and weaknesses from clubs. Or maybe you're happy with your combat capabilties, and you start investigating what leatherworking is like.

Or maybe you never made a break to get combat-ready, because you're new to the game and just trying to figure out what you like. So after a week you only have basic skills in one-handed and two-handed weapons, with additional skills in a few specific weapon types. You have some basic skills in a few different crafts, move slightly faster, have some exploration bonuses, etc. You aren't ready for any super tough content, but that's find, because there's plenty you can do and you're just investigating what you might enjoy. It's not like any of this time is wasted--all skills serve as baselines or prerequisites for something else. It's only "wasted" if you actually intend to never do it again.

You end up realizing that you love blacksmithing. The supply lines, requirements, and material costs are all within your liking. Maybe they even have specific systems for each craft, and you like the interaction blacksmithing requires. So you decide to start training in that. Sure, the city you are in has master smiths. So you start churning out some basic bronze swords. These aren't super powerful weapons, by any means, but there's still a market for them because they're dirt cheap and no one cares if they break. And the master smiths don't bother making them because they can make items with much, much higher profit margins. So even though you're brand new, you're contribtuing to the economy and making something of value. Those swords are being grabbed by new players, and oldhats who are diving into easier dungeons and don't want to risk breaking or losing their better items. Etc.

Progression doesn't have to be level based. At all. We're just used to it. And we're used to it because the industry has been super lazy.

Edited, Mar 1st 2013 2:09pm by idiggory
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#82 Mar 01 2013 at 1:58 PM Rating: Excellent
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The rambling part sounds kind of Skyrim-ish (yes they had levels, but they were largely meaningless and IMO could have been done away with fairly easily), which certainly worked for them in a single-player context, but would have fallen apart in a multiplayer simply because of expectations (You mean you didn't go Breton for the magic damage resist? Are you a fail-tank or what? "You can't be competitive at end-game without 100 enchanting...") . I'm a bit afraid that anything too open is too problematic to work well in a multi-player context. I mean, if you get a druid healer in your random group, and you know what skills they have and what they can do. Rather than a Q/A session: Have you mastered HoTs? AoE spells? Cleanses? How about stuns? You mean you don't have a maxed single-target heal yet? Lol gtfo nub *you've been vote kicked.* (Whether or not you really needed a maxed single-target heal skill being a completely different issue of course.) LF tank for XXX, must have max magic resist. People will always push the boundaries here, necessary or not. If not maxed, then choose some arbitrarily high number.

Basically every reason why Blizzard went away from talent trees in the first place, but more so. There was no good reason most people had to spec a certain way, but boy did it mean you took a lot less crap from the other players. Smiley: rolleyes

Admittedly I don't know enough about EVE though, and whatever they've been doing has worked for them for a very long time. I'd like to see something different as well, I'm just not sure how it happens. Really great games come very rarely. There's only so many Civilization, Halo, Portal, (insert your favorite awesome game here) games out there, and something that has a WoW-scale success is a rarity at best.

If they can find a way to have a nice open system that works well in a fantasy MMO setting I'll probably be all over it. Not sure how that happens though. A competitive environment makes it hard for a sandbox to reach it's fun full potential as you eliminate a lot of the possibilities that do 5% DPS or something. Smiley: frown

Edited, Mar 1st 2013 12:27pm by someproteinguy
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#83 Mar 01 2013 at 2:39 PM Rating: Good
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Well in EVE your race only affects what your starting skills are, and that's it. Every race has the equivalent skills for their own racial weapons/ships, and the total training time to "catch up" (if you want to fly a different race's ships) is negligible in the grand scheme of things. So there's no racial balance issues. And I'm honestly fine with that, because I've never found the PVP bickering about racial skills in WoW all that interesting. I don't really want meaningful bonuses to come back. IMO, racial bonuses should be like skill bonuses in Skyrim; something that's quickly remedied in an hour or two of playing. And maybe they can carry the themes to racial homes, which are just one example of housing layout you could choose to purchase. So Pandaren can start with skill level 3 in amateur cooking (which is the prerequisite to begin training 1 in the next cooking tier).

As for skills, I don't see think that would really be a big issue if the game was properly designed. Since the assumption is that most players won't specialize, people won't be able to afford to demand specialization. And because the actual % increase in output for specializing isn't huge, that's okay. Sure, some content will require a healer who has at least hit the <insert tier number> in the healing type they've chosen (maybe healing can come from the healing school of magic, the chant school of songcraft, or the medicine school of alchemy/herbalism/whatever).

As long as balance is kept within those three schools, the particular differences shouldn't matter too much, because content can't be approached as a min/max formula. In WoW, every Rogue is equal to every other Rogue, just slightly altered by their race/spec/gear. But then that's it. In the context where classes don't exist, but you're training in skills as you want to use them, then it becomes a different story. Now you can't TC for optimal results, because each player is fundamentally different. It's not like you have a baseline you can establish.

Let me put it this way--the actual performance of the skills themselves doesn't need to change, because what you are discussing is the concept of a total package. You might be bringing me along to heal, and equivalently skilled healers don't even need to function that differently across different disciplines, but they can still be distinct. I imagine an equip system to access skills. Healing magic might require a stave be equipped in the main hand, but chants would demand that a "bard" be equipped with, idk, rosaries in their offhand, and "doctors" would need a tincture launcher (or whatever) in their ranged slot.

The end result is that what you really care about, their ability to heal, is equal. But the experience of the actual player changes quite a bit, because what else they can do depends on which slot that healing skill leaves free. A bard could equip a sword and contribute to damage while chanting. The magician could have a wand in their ranged slot, and be flinging arcane arrows while they send out heals. The doctor might have a dagger in their off hand, and have a poison kit (that allows them to poison their allies' weapons on the fly).

Whatever, I'm just tossing out random thoughts. But the end result is the same--because you create the total class, and because each healing discipline requires something different to be sacrificed or used to access those skills, the play experience ends up different when the actual balance of the healing remains intact.
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#84 Mar 01 2013 at 3:13 PM Rating: Excellent
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That would be in the interesting balance to strike. Make it easy enough to do your job well, but at the same time give you a reason to want to further your skill any higher than necessary.

Of course I'm also a soulless abomination after many years of internet gaming, and don't have much faith in people to handle something more complicated than "roll mage, spam frostbolt." Smiley: lol
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#85 Mar 01 2013 at 4:52 PM Rating: Good
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someproteinguy wrote:
That would be in the interesting balance to strike. Make it easy enough to do your job well, but at the same time give you a reason to want to further your skill any higher than necessary.

Of course I'm also a soulless abomination after many years of internet gaming, and don't have much faith in people to handle something more complicated than "roll mage, spam frostbolt." Smiley: lol


I definitely hear you on that one. Not going to lie, one of the things that adds to how well EVE works is the fact that everyone is on server--all 500+k subscribers. But the effect is that your reputation matters. People you **** off can put bounties on you, which adds incentive for others to attack if you wander into unsecured space. You can see a player's reputation with CONCORD (the NPC security corporation). If a player's security status dips too low, they can't even enter high security space without getting destroyed. Corps generally cultivate relationships with other corps, to try and add security to a game world where there literally isn't any. Someone can suicide gank you (attack you in high security space, and kill you before CONCORD arrives and obliterates them. Last year a banking/investment scam made off with, iirc, trillions of in-game currency. And it's all sanctioned by the TOS.

I think this kind of system WOULD demand a higher population for servers. Say, 40k maximum population each (40k players, not 40k characters), at least. I think WoW's populaiton cap is something like 20,000. The trick here is to keep central hubs from dominating everything, like they do in WoW. There's no major reason why every player needs to be in two cities. Though, forunately, there have been a lot of strides in MMOs in the last few years to reduce lag in high-volume areas, so I'm not too worried.
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#86 Mar 01 2013 at 6:38 PM Rating: Excellent
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idiggory wrote:
I'm just worried that the industry is relying too much on a formula and not allowing for real creativity. That formula worked because it was the best combination anyone had found for the technologies available at the time and the needs of the community. We're long passed many of those limitations now--I want to see developers being creative again. The formula has changed. We haven't found the new formula yet. We won't until someone bothers to look.

In my opinion, Blizzard fell into this trap a long time ago. They have a cash cow. They don't really want to rock the boat. They want subs.

I love WoW, don't get me wrong, but it has devolved over time, in my opinion. It has become less immersive, more homogenized, and fankly easy (hardmodes aside, obviously). Everything is accessible, which is good in a way, but also bad, in my opinion. Things like the farm and pet battles, while enjoyable, are really just rip-offs from other popular ideas/games. Pet battles, in particular...and I'm a big addict...really have nothing to do with the game and honestly probably don't belong in an RPG. Blizzard caters to their market. Nothing wrong with that, but they're not really interested in thinking outside the box.

I have more thought, but typing on this iPad is highly annoying. So, I'll try to add some more coherent thoughts later.
#87 Mar 01 2013 at 7:25 PM Rating: Good
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RE:ME3 stuff:

It sounds like they changed _a lot_ since the game's launch. I don't remember "upgrade cards", I remember how it worked, you bought this... box... which gave you random stuff. You had no control over whether it gave you weapons, mods, consumables, etc. I tried saving up for a 2nd tier goodie box (keep in mind I was a soldier) and I got....

a Pistol, an SMG Mod, and a couple consumables after getting nothing but consumables and other mods I didn't really need out of two of the cheapest boxes. I was thinking "Wow, I saved up just to get a pistol that doesn't do much good for me?"

Said pistol wasn't even much of an upgrade; it was a side-grade to the one I was already using.

As far as matches go... at game's launch, I remember you could start your own matches, or you could specify a challenge level/arena/enemy type, BUT if I recall correctly, the game implied you get less reward for it.

OR, you could click the "Random" button. I played 10-12 matches, and all but 2 of those randoms were Silver matches. I woulda thought that it would at least stick you in a match befitting your level, but meh.

But yeah sounds like they changed it a lot. Oh well. maybe some day I'll mess around with it if I get bored.
#88 Mar 01 2013 at 8:33 PM Rating: Good
If you're having trouble with ME3 multi there's probably just one thing you're doing wrong, which is bunkering down. Don't do this. You should use cover, yeah, but you have to keep moving or you'll be overrun. The problem with multi is basically that like any horde mode game it gets too easy after a while. I haven't played it in about half a year.

Also, yeah, those random packs were some serious **********
#89 Mar 01 2013 at 8:41 PM Rating: Good
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RE: ME3 people

You may want to check out Warframe. A Lot of people like it because it feels like ME3 MP, its free to play, Co-op. I find it pretty fun, very fast and interesting. They had a patch right after that vid was made adding new scenarios/areas, which was one of his concerns.

Also Zam is giving away Beta keys. http://www.zam.com/giveaways/warframe.html
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#90 Mar 02 2013 at 5:56 AM Rating: Good
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Quote:
As far as matches go... at game's launch, I remember you could start your own matches, or you could specify a challenge level/arena/enemy type, BUT if I recall correctly, the game implied you get less reward for it.

OR, you could click the "Random" button. I played 10-12 matches, and all but 2 of those randoms were Silver matches. I woulda thought that it would at least stick you in a match befitting your level, but meh.


"Random" adds an experience buff for random maps and random enemies (25% total, iirc). But you still specify the difficulty. I don't think there is a random option where difficulty is concerned, actually.

And Warframe looks interesting. I requested a Beta key--we'll see how it works out. I worry that a pure PVE game won't really hold player attention, though.
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IDrownFish wrote:
Anyways, you all are horrible, @#%^ed up people

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