Blizzard dies and Bobby rides

Break · Sep 7, 2021

Cinge said:
I think your final thought is basically impossible. Unless you somehow had every boss have a possible list of abilities/mechanics at least 10-20 long and what you got was pure roll of the dice. But even then every ability/mechanic will be recorded and written about to understand every single one. Strats for video games have been around since they introduced. Its just the medium in which those strats got around has changed.

Most likely, yes. There was a time during EQ though where if you were in a top guild during PoP, Luclin and maybe even Velious, you were probably using strats that weren't documented on the Safehouse or other forums. Guild leaders and even members that actually had novel strats didn't blab them to the whole world, because it meant they were just increasing their competition. The guild members generally wouldn't either, because they knew that knowledge was power (and loots), what they stood to gain or lose, etc.

I remember applying to one guild during Luclin and wiping with them over and over and over and over to this one boss and never killing it, I think in Ssra Temple. Shortly after when I applied to the top guild on the server, I was happy to see them kill that same mob on my first raid with them. They went about it completely differently and killed it easily. Now if that other guild had the same strat, I have no doubt they would have won too, but this dynamic of secret knowledge has been very interesting to me for a long time.

One *possible* way might be to have so many different bosses and types of encounters that no 2 raid parties will ever encounter the same bosses twice, making any information shared between them less useful. They could also have server-specific tweaks, on one server the dragon breathes fire, on another frost or there are completely different enemies in the raid zones. I kinda like this latter idea to be honest.

Lithose · Sep 7, 2021

Break said:
Also, does anyone else 'member when strats for every single boss weren't plastered on every forum by the first schmuck who couldn't wait to tell the world ? I'm going to suggest too that the best MMO will somehow, someway be resistant to having how-to guides published online. A unicorn? Maybe, but just imagine if players had to think for themselves again in raids. Dayum.

This is probably one of the things that died with the growth of the internet.

Kirun mentioned it, and he's right--there is just a bunch of stuff that was magic in 99 but will never be again because the internet is too robust now.

However, I do think there are ways to capture some of that magic again. IMO, the next big MMO will exploit one of two advances, either VR or replacing scripting with sophisticated "AI", where NPCs have complex behaviors but don't stick to scripts. Its a long way off, so I doubt it will be something for our generation--but that will be the next big leap forward in MMOs, and I think it strikes toward what you're thinking of. Mobs reacting to you in an intuitive way, rather than following a script, especially if they learn and adapt over time--make strategies more difficult. They will still be there, I'm sure--but things will be a lot more interesting.

Hateyou · Sep 7, 2021

Lithose said:
This is probably one of the things that died with the growth of the internet. Kirun mentioned it, and he's right--there is just a bunch of stuff that was magic in 99 but will never be again because the internet is too robust now.

However, I do think there are ways to capture some of that magic again. IMO, the next big MMO will exploit one of two advances, either VR or replacing scripting with sophisticated "AI", where NPCs have complex behaviors but don't stick to scripts. Its a long way off, so I doubt it will be something for our generation--but that will be the next big leap forward in MMOs, and I think it strikes toward what you're thinking of. Mobs reacting to you in an intuitive way, rather than following a script, especially if they learn and adapt over time--make strategies more difficult. They will still be there, I'm sure--but things will be a lot more interesting.

There is one way to have that strat stuff back again. If your game is a technical piece of shit like Vangaurd and barely anyone plays, but enough that it keeps the lights on, that still happens. I was in the top guild during the time it was still putting out new raid content and we were really far ahead of the next guild, cause we didn’t tell them shit. Once we had loot rotting, people would start telling their buddies in the other guild the strat and they’d start killing it. It was like clockwork, once we started having loot rot, oh wow they killed it for first time yesterday.

Internet was robust enough then, I remember reading about wow loot before the expansion even came out. Just no one cared about VG enough to host the info. Was pretty cool.

No one can really design with that in mind, just saying it can still happen in small games. It’s not going to happen in big blockbuster MMOs, if those are even a thing in the future.

Kirun · Sep 8, 2021

Cybsled said:
That sounds like shit that no one would play. “You can’t keep good gear if you die, also btw if yo get good gear it breaks and you have to use shit gear until your good gear fixes itself”.

People are already playing it and it has been running since 2017.

The game he is describing is almost exactly what Albion Online is. There are a few differences, but it hosts very similar systems to what he describes.

That's what I mean about this design philosophy that developers started preaching and "the public" just latched onto - unless it competes with WoW, it ain't worth making/playing. That because it's somehow niche, the game is automatically shit and it becomes easy to write off with, "LOL NOBODY PLAYZ! DED GAME!".

Neranja · Sep 8, 2021

Cybsled said:
If you implemented a system that said "You get 5-10% more xp if you level with people on your server", all that does is make the people playing on the "dead" server more acutely aware they are on a dead server.

After skimming the thread a bit I think most people here already explained to you why socializing needs to be incentivized. But this one thing I want to come back to:

Here I'd like to flip your argument around a bit. You are actually arguing against the "playing together bonus" with the fact that Blizzard would also have to do something about the dead servers, because it would make players feel bad instead.

The only thing I could say about that is: Yeah, exactly. Blizzard neglected a lot of things in WoW, and dead servers is one of the bullet points on that list.

The players already have been--at least here in the EU--clamoring for Blizzard to merge servers. For the last two expansions, really. And they were really pissed off when with the Shadowlands preparation a big Horde server got merged with a medium sized Horde server. So we already have players here that are acutely aware that they are on a "dead" server, and they even posted on the forums that they'd rather quit the game than pay for character transfer.

But Blizzard didn't do anything for a long time. Either because there's no one left for EU community management, or because at this point even "connecting servers" is seen as an admission of "ded game".

Cybsled · Sep 8, 2021

WoW's problem is mostly unique because of the forced 2 faction system. In those instances, it isn't a dead server so to speak, it is just horrible faction imbalance.

xmod2 · Sep 8, 2021

Lithose said:
The issue though, has nuance. Faceless, unneeded people don't keep you playing--friends do. Simply being in a guild isn't enough to be a friend. To form friends you need to overcome some adversity, you need to have a genuine need for something they can give you.

There have been studies done that show how friendships develop. One of the features was 'repeatedly bumping into one another doing something where the goal wasn't to meet up'. ie. at your kid's soccer practice or ballet class, etc. You can't force people to meet up with the express purpose of making friends and have it stick. You need to keep bumping into the same people doing something else and eventually a relationship will start to develop. This is more ammo for the 'keep server communities together' argument. If the developers don't want to have the limitations of servers due to hardware / design demands, they should at least create logical 'social glue' where you are weighed much more likely to be randomly assigned to the same people as before. They also need all social groupings (guilds, etc) to be independent of their hardware.

Lithose said:
This is exactly it. The worst thing that can happen to me in most modern MMOs is I don't get what I want as quickly...That's the "risk", that it might take you 10 units of time vs 7 if you don't do things correctly. There is no risk, there is no tension. Its boring.

A meme developed early on in MMOs that the only thing that differentiated the good from the bad was time. Hence why good players are poopsockers and nolifers and not just 'good' at the game. In that environment, the biggest penalty that can possibly be imposed is to slow you down.

Lithose said:
This is probably one of the things that died with the growth of the internet. Kirun mentioned it, and he's right--there is just a bunch of stuff that was magic in 99 but will never be again because the internet is too robust now.

Besides datamining sites (there was always allah, etc), people neglect that the height of MMOs was pre-social media. There just weren't as many ways to interact with your friends and keep track of them outside of the game. WoW guilds were as much social network / discord servers as they were groups of players intended to kill dragons. A lot of people would log into the game and just hang out chatting in /gu.

Cybsled · Sep 8, 2021

All I get from this is a bunch of older people that are looking for a specific community that meets their needs, then concludes there is a problem with the game itself when they can’t find it

These games have communities already, most of us just choose not to participate in them

Kirun · Sep 8, 2021

Cybsled said:
These games have communities already, most of us just choose not to participate in them

Because you don't have to or otherwise be convinced to. Welcome to human nature - exacerbated by an activity that inherently attracts introverts.

Neranja · Sep 8, 2021

Cybsled said:
All I get from this is a bunch of older people that are looking for a specific community that meets their needs, then concludes there is a problem with the game itself when they can’t find it

You seriously should read about Nudge Theory.

Lithose · Sep 8, 2021

xmod2 said:
Besides datamining sites (there was always allah, etc), people neglect that the height of MMOs was pre-social media. There just weren't as many ways to interact with your friends and keep track of them outside of the game. WoW guilds were as much social network / discord servers as they were groups of players intended to kill dragons. A lot of people would log into the game and just hang out chatting in /gu.

I've said this on here before, but social media companies ended up making better MMOs than MMOs went onto make, because they focused on people while MMOs focused purely on the game.

MMOs will never compete as purely just games, single player games and "small scale" online games will always be superior games. MMOs need to compete as social networks, too. Because, as you said, a huge aspect of MMOs was the large network of consistent friends you had to develop.

Cybsled said:
All I get from this is a bunch of older people that are looking for a specific community that meets their needs, then concludes there is a problem with the game itself when they can’t find it

These games have communities already, most of us just choose not to participate in them

If the games weren't dying, this might be pertinent--but the whole genre is dying, and people are pointing toward conditions in which it grew rapidly and saying 'shit worked then'.

Lithose · Sep 8, 2021

xmod2 said:
A meme developed early on in MMOs that the only thing that differentiated the good from the bad was time. Hence why good players are poopsockers and nolifers and not just 'good' at the game. In that environment, the biggest penalty that can possibly be imposed is to slow you down.

Well, I think the difference is previously MMOs took time from you--now they slightly delay reward. By that I mean, if you died, you lost experience (Or gear in UO ect), you lost things you'd already gained. Those things eventually translated simply into time, yeah...But that kind of negative reinforcement is different from today, where all that will happen is a player will slow down slightly in what he gains, he'll never risk losing anything.

Psychologically, there is a difference there, I think--even if both methods just cost time.

Kirun · Sep 8, 2021

Lithose said:
If the games weren't dying, this might be pertinent--but the whole genre is dying, and people are pointing toward conditions in which it grew rapidly and saying 'shit worked then'.

Is it though? Once upon a time many thought the genre's absolute "peak" was 1m players and that MMOs would just cannibalize from each other. We obviously know that isn't the case and with the rise in popularity of "Korean" MMOs, I'm not so certain it's a "dying" genre.

Now, I will agree that the genre left something "behind", when devs adopted the "it has to be WoW or it sucks" model, but I don't really agree that it's necessarily "dying".

Lithose said:
Well, I think the difference is previously MMOs took time from you--now they slightly delay reward. By that I mean, if you died, you lost experience (Or gear in UO ect), you lost things you'd already gained. Those things eventually translated simply into time, yeah...But that kind of negative reinforcement is different from today, where all that will happen is a player will slow down slightly in what he gains, he'll never risk losing anything.

Psychologically, there is a difference there, I think--even if both methods just cost time.

The difference is in one instance you have to REEARN something you already had(experience, gear, etc.). In the case of "modern" MMOs, they are simply delaying something that you never actually had in the first place. The former can feel like "theft", spawning a much more visceral reaction - and a higher sense of "overcoming". In the latter, it's simply delaying gratification.

There's a MASSIVE psychological difference there. We can debate if that's "good" or "bad" psychologically, but I think games like Dark Souls do a good job in proving that it's something players enjoy on some level.

Cybsled · Sep 8, 2021

Exactly. Losing something you already earned feels way worse, which is part of the reason Ashes of Creation is going to bomb hard after the first month or so if they don't adjust that.

Players have an extremely limited appetite for losing shit they worked hard to get

Daidraco · Sep 8, 2021

Cybsled said:
Exactly. Losing something you already earned feels way worse, which is part of the reason Ashes of Creation is going to bomb hard after the first month or so if they don't adjust that.

Players have an extremely limited appetite for losing shit they worked hard to get

You're buying into the same shit that has caused developers to follow the "WoW' formula for the last 10-15 years. Every single time a new MMO is talked about, someone says the same shit "They need to change this shit if they want more players" which is essentially just turning the game into the same .. fucking.. game... we've been playing all this time. No one is going to capture the "may flies" that swoop into every single game for a month at best and quit. There is no point in doing massive changes to penalties, systems etc. if no matter what you change - those players arent going to stay.

Succeed or fail, an MMO needs to stick to its guns within its first 6 months at minimum, and figure out what hills are worth dying on. Conduit Energy? No fucking way was that ever worth being a pivotal argument with players in WoW, for example.

Cybsled · Sep 8, 2021

Daidraco said:
Succeed or fail, an MMO needs to stick to its guns within its first 6 months at minimum, and figure out what hills are worth dying on.

This is a double edged sword. Just like "opening weekends" for movies, that will make or break the long term profitability of a game. Look at how many games get absolutely fucking roasted (undeserved or not) for bad launches then years later have trouble getting people back, even if they're good games.

Sure, making changes too early can be just as bad as making changes too late, but at the same time you shouldn't design a game blind to lessons learned from other games and then fall into the same trap because you're too high on your own product to see the issue.

Daidraco · Sep 8, 2021

Cybsled said:
This is a double edged sword. Just like "opening weekends" for movies, that will make or break the long term profitability of a game. Look at how many games get absolutely fucking roasted (undeserved or not) for bad launches then years later have trouble getting people back, even if they're good games.

Sure, making changes too early can be just as bad as making changes too late, but at the same time you shouldn't design a game blind to lessons learned from other games and then fall into the same trap because you're too high on your own product to see the issue.

The movies reference isnt quite comparable. I understand what you're trying to imply from it, but thats more comparable to something like FFXIV where it took years to come into popularity in my mind. FFXIV's poor launch wasnt due to just a simple few things, but a laundry list of just absolutely horrible mechanics, bugs, art reuse and more. AoC is already leaps and bounds ahead with where they are and they arent even close to launch.

What I was getting at is that no one is happy with any game in its entirety, they always want to change one thing or another. A non creative, business minded, developer is going to try to incorporate all of those things in order to capture as many of those people as possible.. which is going to lead to .. essentially... a WoW clone. Which sounds great on paper, but thats a profit now mentality. Im just saying Shariff needs to stick to his "vision" of what he wants and fuck anyone saying he needs to do this or that until its obnoxiously clear that his "vision" is wrong.

I actually liked the game play of AoC - if animations and a laundry list of other shit are adjusted/fixed, then Ill play it at launch. I'm just not very keen on logging into it anymore until then (I didnt pay for the access, so its w/e to me).

Kirun · Sep 8, 2021

Cybsled said:
Exactly. Losing something you already earned feels way worse, which is part of the reason Ashes of Creation is going to bomb hard after the first month or so if they don't adjust that.

Players have an extremely limited appetite for losing shit they worked hard to get

We'd have to define "bomb". A game that has 50-100k subscribers can still be wildly successful from a profit standpoint.

Again, this "if it ain't pulling WoW numbers, it's shit!" mentality really needs to die. ESPECIALLY now that we've seen how successful "indie" titles can be. What were the 3 most successful games last year? Among Us, Valheim, and Fall Guys? How many of those were Triple AAA, blow their socks off, include EVERY feature type titles?

Games are mainstream enough and it has been proven over and over again that it isn't just a "pool" of players you have to fight over. It's now an entire fucking ocean.

mkopec · Sep 8, 2021

I thnk its gonna be hard to get 10+ million players in a mmorpg ever again. That game would have to be shitting good and awesome colored rainbows in order to do this. While I agree there is whole oceans of gamers now, there is just so many games, so many generes of these games that those days have sailed. WOW hit at the perfect storm. Blizzard name was still gold, computer prices that could play it were finally reasonable plus wow could run on a fucking toaster. Also to seal the deal at the time internet came out of the dial up dark ages into the mainstream DSL and cable with affordable prices. Plus not to mention WOW classic was a good fucking game to boot.

Daidraco · Sep 8, 2021

User count for the internet goes up daily. Thats the "behind the scenes" of the "ocean" remark. Unique internet users grows by the 1000's daily. Old, young, poverty line, rich people, etc. - 10 million in an "ocean" of 7 billion people is an insignificant amount in comparison. WoW's success may have been the perfect storm at the time - but saying that its not achievable anytime soon is just short sighted.

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