EQ Never

That's called a dynamic ecosystem. It would be an interesting game.

As far as WOW, I don't really care if other people see the same bosses I do, but I really hate the idea of having three versions of the same raid. It just dilutes the content. I would prefer a more steady decline of raid difficulty over time.

Raid 1 Released - Normal Difficulty (only difficulty)
|
|
V
Raid progressively gets easier over time. Zone buffs/debuffs etc.
|
|
|
V
Raid 2 is Released - Normal difficulty. Raid 1 is now "easy".

Then once you get to Raid 3, Raid 1 is like retard-mode easy, and Raid 2 is then easy etc. You just have to figure out how much time after a raid's release you start adding the zone debuffs/buffs. Like 1 month? Then just design raids so there is entry level stuff for everyone to do. Make the first 3 bosses "easier" and get progressively harder. Add in some loot-pinata-like mini bosses or platform games or whatever in the zone so people can have fun week to week.

Instead of making a Raid zone just about bosses, make it a bit of a playground as well.

Shrug.

It creates a lot of potential for community interaction. Gathering and honing the resources to custom create 'your' raid mob could entail employing any number of crafters or making numerous trades etc

The gear reset each patch need to go. It obsoletes all content before it and you end up with one raid zone needing to be everything to everyone at the same time, which leads to all the contrived bullshit we see now.

I was never in a hardcore guild in EQ, but in a "2-3 nights a week of casual raiding" one. We killed Quarm for the first time when the FoH's and Darkwinds of the world already had GoD (three expansions ahead) on farm. Sure we used group loot and AA's from newer expansions but we (being casuals) still found it challenging, we certainly had fun and we still got some decent upgrades out of it.
An added benefit was that the non-hardcore never ran in to the problem of having to farm one zone over and over for lack of something more challenging to do, they had 2-3 expansions worth of stuff to move up to. Obviously FoH-level guilds ran in to that wall many times but the 90% non-hardcore players never had that problem. In WoW, everyone runs in to the wall, thinly disguised or not.

The gear resets are something I didnt like at all with WoW. I'd prefer a progression where at every point of a characters existance you can solo, group or raid for your gear and the items gradually increase. Lets say for weapons you have 100dps items you can get solo, 110dps items through group content, and 120dps items through raid content. So the difference is not too big but you notice it. When new content rolls out the solo items there have 110dps. group items 120, raid items 130 and so on. Then you can have the odd item requiring some extra effort that breaks the mold, like a difficult group quest for a 115dps item while regular group content is still at 110dps. In my model content would not be nerfed to be easier every month, instead players that couldnt handle it eventually get better gear through the stuff they can handle to get into those group dungeons or raids. In a way WoW even does that, but instead of giving new content they nerf the raids every month or tag on more,easier retard-modes for diminished items. And then they throw their progression away every oother year with a gear reset. I dont like that approach and would like some company to try a gradual progression that does stay in the game forever. Catching up is still easier because a player can follow the solo progression with some group content thrown in instead of having to go through the raid route (but at any point, there's also appropriate raid content if desired).

I don't think Blizzard did a gear reset just for the point of doing a gear reset, but rather because they threw out old mechanics/metrics with every expansion. It would certainly be nice to have a developer with a bit more foresight, but i wouldn't expect that from SoE.

Mr Creed_sl said:

The gear resets are something I didnt like at all with WoW. I'd prefer a progression where at every point of a characters existance you can solo, group or raid for your gear and the items gradually increase. Lets say for weapons you have 100dps items you can get solo, 110dps items through group content, and 120dps items through raid content. So the difference is not too big but you notice it. When new content rolls out the solo items there have 110dps. group items 120, raid items 130 and so on. Then you can have the odd item requiring some extra effort that breaks the mold, like a difficult group quest for a 115dps item while regular group content is still at 110dps. In my model content would not be nerfed to be easier every month, instead players that couldnt handle it eventually get better gear through the stuff they can handle to get into those group dungeons or raids. In a way WoW even does that, but instead of giving new content they nerf the raids every month or tag on more,easier retard-modes for diminished items. And then they throw their progression away every oother year with a gear reset. I dont like that approach and would like some company to try a gradual progression that does stay in the game forever. Catching up is still easier because a player can follow the solo progression with some group content thrown in instead of having to go through the raid route (but at any point, there's also appropriate raid content if desired).

Click to expand...

I'm a fan of having multiple things to do at all points of the game (options!) and I generally agree that gear resets are stupid. Especially when you take a huge hit in the looks department because some lower tiered piece of gear but higher item level deal has better stats but looks like ass. Penny Arcade's expansion comic comes to mind. What the game should have done is allow progression for people finished with the expansion and then allow people with less powerful gear to make up the difference via crafted stuff using new resources, with the increased power of the expansion allowing for easier accrual of gear from the previous content to let them do the current shit. Also, there's really no reason to continually expand the level range and amp up HP/resource totals to retarded levels and instead have the content be the reason to visit the expansion, not the hilarious inflation of stats and numbers. It's not like mobs didn't scale with you, it just 100% trivialized all previous content that wasn't ddr mechanic happy.

If you need someone to be caught up in gear to a cutting edge guild in a hurry, have raid craftable shit to fill in the majority of the holes so that they don't have to run shit like POT into infinity to get the shit needed for people not to instantly die from AEs and what not. Mix and match from the mmo twins. While I don't think "forcing" someone to do old content to be current is something the genre needs, the content should follow a reasonable progression that makes sense and becomes easier naturally over time (through mudflation, improved abilities, higher skillcaps, whatever) but isn't instantly trivialized when new content is released.

Still thinking that procedurally generated content that cascades into progressively more rape-mode content as shit is killed is probably the best way to handle progression in our sandbox concept.
PS: EQ was really heavily about gear acquisition, and I personally enjoy that type of power growth. But make the power growth more linear from level 1 - max (if levels are used) instead of everything being mostly shit til you hit endgame, then everything is all/all 0.0 wt with 100 to all stats. That's just silly imo.

Draegan_sl said:

Anyway, TLDR: Less "rotation" combat, and more reactive.

Click to expand...

Yep, in everything from rats to raids, but not as scripted as today's mmo's are. Add rezz's idea of mobs that fight differently every time you try it. The reaction idea has been tried a few times, but with limited success.

Part of what makes mmos so boring is the fact that most encounters are predictable and a macro rotation fest.

The only way they could pull off a proper sandbox MMO is to make progression work sideways, making it impossibly difficult to max out a character for a particular metric/role but allowing your character to perform more and more roles over time at a decent level. Progress would have to come through a variety of sources: accumulating wealth, building, establishing control over territory through conquest or politics, establishing control over markets, climbing competitive ladders, creating user generated content. This probably would have to mean no character levels, zero mudflation, destructible equipment and buildings, competitive PvP, most items being player built. Of course none of that would matter if combat and progression in all these lateral systems is not a fun and social experience. I don't have much confidence in SOE being to pull off anything like that but we will see soon. If EQ Next has character levels or lacks destructible equipment and structures then it won't be anything revolutionary like Smedley claims but just another level/gear progression MMO.

lothix is right. A game that wants to be a good sandbox needs a variety of facets, well beyond combat and loot.

I think every activity that has ever been introduced into a MMO system can fall into one of three categories: Adventuring, Trade, Politics.

Adventuring is the facet that everyone is most familiar with. Dungeon crawls, monster hunting, loot finding, raiding, questing... all of these things fall under this group.

Trade is a facet that gets dabbled with in most mmos, but not nearly to the extent that it was seen in some muds or even facebook games. Trade is much more than sitting in front of a forge making ingots all day. A good trade system has resource harvesting, production, transportation, security, and investment aspects and markets that revolve around each. They key here is to allow players to get beyond the simple shop keep mentality of trading and into the real trade network and guildmaster type activities.

Politics is another facet that barely gets touched upon. A good political system involves territory control, infrastructure management, logistics, large scale battles, intelligence gathering, covert ops (sabotage, assassination), and some form of influence or political clout mechanic to shift major votes and decisions your way.

Most games only focus on the combat aspect of a political system. Having a battleground where people fight over flags is not enough, or even that exciting. Pvp is integral to a good political system but it needs depth and a multitude of ways to screw over your enemies. Otherwise it misses a lot of opportunities to incorporate the other facets. And that is where a sand box game really pulls together; in how these facets meet and interact.

Adventurers can be given tasks from political entities and become engaged in the struggle for control. They can achieve critical objectives to sway a battle, be hired as assassins, collect critical intelligence and gain rank and renown as war heroes.

Politicians and leaders can buy a whole host of services from hiring conscripts, to buying armaments, buying intel, selling land, collecting taxes, approving licenses to operate businesses, and generally spending lots of money.

Traders can hire adventurers to acquire rare and valuable goods, fill quotas for raw materials, hire them as security for dangerous routes, hire them to deliver questionable goods (smuggling), hire them to eliminate competition.

Most mmos are stuck in adventure time (cool cartoon). However, if they were to really flesh out the trade and politics branches of potential activities, suddenly that purpose for doing things that everyone is searching for would present itself.

I know Vanguard said it was going to go with a three sphere system, but it never looked like that came to be.

Pancreas_sl said:

Get away from repeatable scripted encounters then.
.

Click to expand...

One of my favorite fights in WoW was the arena fight in ToC. There's so much chaotic shit going on that any plan falls apart within a few seconds. You can't choreograph how you're going to fight it beyond who is responsible for what. There was a little bit of randomness every time in encounter makeup (what classes you faced) but not enough to be bullshit. You work as a team and communication is important but you're all kind of on your own. It was perfect.

I want more fights like it. You don't need the boss to have 20 abilities and it randomly picks 3 to use. Just the nature of the fight itself should be hard to plan for more then just a vague outline.

Quaid_sl said:

Hmmm that's kinda interesting. What if there was a set of skills in the game that allowed a PC to 'sense' incoming attacks?

Click to expand...

You have to be careful with stuff like that. There's a fine line between bullshit mandatory and neat addition. Essentially forcing players to kill 100 of everything just so they get the cool swirly warning lights is bullshit mandatory. It's like required faction grinds in WoW or EQ. Nobody likes that shit.

EmiliaEQ_sl said:

While i disliked "random" abilities like Deathtouch, AE Fear, Teleport, CornerWarp, they gave you "semi controlled chaos".

Click to expand...

There is nothing wrong with random abilities. Random abilities you can't recover from are what's bullshit. You should never auto-lose to random. That's why DT was such bullshit. There was a 5 or 10% chance or whatever of you auto-losing if the wrong people got DT'd. If you're going to DT at least make it interesting like Burning Affliction in WoW. BA was hilarious shit. Listening to people get more and more frantic on vent. "Jonas move. Jonas. YOU HAVE BA JONAS. JONAS FUCKING MOVE!!! FUCKING FUCK! Goddamnit Jonas."

Creslin_sl said:

The real problem is doing any of this content for longer than 2-3 months sucks.

Click to expand...

One thing you need to do is sit down and realizewhyyou're still doing this shit 2~3 months later. It's usually because you have 1 or 2 last items you need or the boss is on the way to the boss you need shit from. Making the stuff ezmoad farm once you mudflate a bit is one solution, sure...but it's just as annoying. We could do black temple blind fold but having to slog through 13 or whatever bosses plus all the trash clearing just to get a shot at Illidan and fail to get what we wanted was soul crushing.

I propose a different solution. For one thing, you always get something useful from the boss. This is a -long- fucking discussion and people start spouting off shit about how gambling is addicting and blah blah blah but let me just get to the crux. Bosses have a built in expiration. You know after you kill xyz boss....15 times you'll have gotten everything you need from him for everyone. And from then on you can just skip him. Bam.

There's a lot more to it but this post is getting stupidly long.

Lambourne_sl said:

The gear reset each patch need to go. It obsoletes all content before it and you end up with one raid zone needing to be everything to everyone at the same time, which leads to all the contrived bullshit we see now.

Click to expand...

I agree. I hated the idea of this in WOW, and was really pissed to see Rift and SWTOR (and other games, I'm sure) copy it completely.

Rezz_sl said:

PS: EQ was really heavily about gear acquisition, and I personally enjoy that type of power growth. But make the power growth more linear from level 1 - max (if levels are used) instead of everything being mostly shit til you hit endgame, then everything is all/all 0.0 wt with 100 to all stats. That's just silly imo.

Click to expand...

You're still going to see mudflation. One idea we were kicking around is getting away from the stat-based RPG concept and go with a more adventure game theme of item progression. Think less Dragon Warrior where you go copper sword -> flame sword -> edrick's sword and more like Legend of Zelda where you get the hookshot, bombs, boomerang and bottles.

To cut a really long post short the general idea is that you can have any...let's say 3...3 items active when you go into combat alongside your classes 5 or so spells. Yes, think GW2 and how it handled weapons giving you more 'spells'. Similar to that only more modular with more variety.

Then the game becomes about getting these items. Collect them all, Pokemon style. You want to kill Illidan not because he has a sword that's 20 more dps then what you're currently using, you kill him because you can rip his wings off and use them as a 'slow fall' glider from now on if you have them equipped. You kill Ragnaros not because he has a bunch of pants (Why does he have so many pants?) but because you can take his burning core which can be used to summon waves of fire that push enemies back.

This has two major benefits. One...there's no such thing as a useless boss drop. You don't run into the problem of getting shaman pants for 17 weeks in a row when all you want is the tank shield off the fucking dragon boss in Sunwell. Fuck those shaman pants.

Secondly old raids stay relevant but not mandatory for new players. We all like the concept of old content being relevant and not useless once a gear reset hits but nobody wants new players to have to slog through 5 years of old raids just to get caught up. This allows new players to just get a handful of useful items and then join the current raiding progression and you can go back or form open raids to get shit you missed.

The hardest part of such a thing though is the inventory management. Overtime players will have 100, 200 or even more items and being able to quickly find what you need will be a pain in the ass. Plus developers having to keep thinking up new ideas for items but that's what those lazy as fuck item designers should be doing instead of trying to figure out what right click effect the +dps trinket should have. Should it be raw attack power or crit rating this time huehuehue.

Pancreas_sl said:

lothix is right. A game that wants to be a good sandbox needs a variety of facets, well beyond combat and loot.

I think every activity that has ever been introduced into a MMO system can fall into one of three categories: Adventuring, Trade, Politics.

*snip*

Click to expand...

Along these lines, an idea I had for a sort of conceptual framework to build a sandbox MMO around would be to take the Bartle player archetypes, plus the addition of a builder/crafter as a fifth archetype, and building complete gameplay spheres around each of them.

Crafters build cities, craft gear, and act as traders.

Socializers form the government of those cities, acting as rulers, diplomats, etc

Killers get to act as soldiers and mercenaries, defending or attacking cities, killing monsters for the more civilian players, and so on.

And Explorers get to do things like seek out new resource deposits, find ruins that may have treasure in them, learn lore that has a practical use in-game, etc

Achiever is kinda hard to figure out as a discrete gameplay sphere, it might make more sense for achievement to be represented by all the other spheres having some sort of mechanic in place to allow for exceptional players to be recognized.

But yeah, all those spheres would feed into each other, with Explorers finding new sources of wealth, Crafters supplying everybody, Killers protecting the others, and helping to retrieve the wealth located in dangerous locales, and the Socializers keeping everybody organized.

This thread got really good in a hurry, basically the last few pages are why I come here to talk about these things. Since this sort of turned into a "what I would like to see in MMOs" I thought I would add where I've been going with this.

Essentially I think we need more movement from the abstract to the concrete, and it seems many people here think this is the case as well. If you kind of go way back to P&P RPGs you end up in a place that lives completely in the mind, so it is entirely abstract. Here, you basically need to represent EVERYTHING with stats and numbers.

Pulling one example, dodging and armor are technically just two (subtleties aside) redundant forms of damage mitigation. Except they aren't redundant in a P&P RPG because they represent the fantasy fufillment of playing a rogue versus playing a fighter. You don't literally jump around the kitchen table when RPing a rogue, so that has to be represented in some way in this abstract space to make you feel like a rogue.

Early MMORPGs continued this tradition for two pretty good reasons. Firstly, it was what people knew. RPG makers in general were/are avid P&P fans and so they used what they were intimately familiar with. P&P systems generally aren't all that great for video games, or at least they aren't as suited for them as they could be, but you tend to use what you know (and for good reason).

Secondly, massive technical limitations kept RPGs firmly in this abstract space that I described above. Some things moved into the concrete world such as visuals and distance (although this could be concrete in P&P as well). The groundbreaking part of these early MMOs wasn't necessarily in the game itself, but in virtualizing the kitchen table you sat around to play them. This worked pretty well, with early MUDs and MMOs using many of the the same tools P&P had used to solve the same problem (how to build fantasy fufillment in an abstract space).

We don't have those technical limitations anymore, at least not nearly as severely as we used to. With modern broadband, multi-core processors, and better engines, not to mention the rise of new software tools like noSQL databases and concurrent programming languages we are technically capable of dragging loads of the abstract into the concrete.

This has many advantages. It lowers the accessibility barrier without lowering the skill cap, we can harness more of a player's brain in decision-making processes, we don't bog players down with numbers and let them experience more of the game, the RPG systems can be simplified to distill them down to their meaningful choices, and in general they are just more fun to play for many people.

To briefly cover an example I will use auto-attack since it came up recently. What is auto-attack? It is basically a character's stats expressed as base DPS. Why do we do this? In P&P where math was done by brains it greatly simplified the calculations so players could concentrate on the metagame. In early MMOs it had the advantage of working around some generally pretty high latency. The server just needs to receive the "start dps" and "stop dps" instructions and doesn't have to wait for client input for even basic dps, punishing players less for a high ping (it doesn't exactly work this way, but close enough).

Well, we really don't have to worry about latency that much anymore. This is great news, because now we can make Base DPS something that is a game in-and-of-itself rather than just an expression of stats. We can take all that giant hotbar basic rotation button mashing and roll it into a single system that involves decision making around a few but incredibly meaningful choices. It simultaneously simplifies a game, and adds depth. It is kind of like physics, where you know a design is good by how concurrently elegant and powerful it is.

To call on my earlier example, dodging is another "stat" that is a great candidate to drag into the concrete realm. Our brains are a bit like a multi-core processor in that they are fully capable of some pretty amazing parallelism, but only if they processes are separated properly. It is the reason you are able to ride a bike through traffic while doing complex math in your head, but can't even add two simple equations at the same time. Our brains lots of processing power navigating 3D spaces. This is actually physically located in a different area than your frontal lobe, which involves higher level decision making. By carefully orchestrating what kinds of decisions a player is making at a given time, complexity can be added to a game without actually making it more difficult on an overall level. This is one example of a trick to making a game more engaging and satisfying without necessarily making it more difficult.

Anyway, keep this thread going in this interesting direction! I really enjoy reading it.

I'm not sure if it's just too early, but was that a abstract way of making combat more action based like TERA? TERA was actually fun to actively play. You didn't mind grinding mobs because you had fun just fighting.

But like everything, it got old because the content got stale around level 35, but fuck me if tanking wasn't incredibly enjoyable.

Those are all good ideas, but like Denaut alluded to, you need to create the systems which those will be placed in. Are you hotbar based? Twitched based? All those ideas different depending on the ecosystem you place them in.

Proper design starts at the top where you conceptualize how your character moves and interacts within a game space. Perfect example is comparing WOW to GW2 to TERA. All different but they also have many similarities.

Then once you have that down, you have to implement how your character engages in combat. etc.

Then you can decide on how your character interacts with all those layers above, and then your topic fits in nicely. This is where Denaut (and I) have a problem with Mark Jacobs, because he skips everything and assumes everyone it talking, contextually, from the same point of view. Obviously, this thread tells you that's almost never true. He skips all that and gets into the weeds.

Draegan_sl said:

I'm not sure if it's just too early, but was that a abstract way of making combat more action based like TERA? TERA was actually fun to actively play. You didn't mind grinding mobs because you had fun just fighting.

But like everything, it got old because the content got stale around level 35, but fuck me if tanking wasn't incredibly enjoyable.

Click to expand...

Yea, sure, that is one expression of it. I didn't play a whole lot of TERA, but I played the hell out of Global Agenda and I thought it did an overall excellent job. Ultimately you'll always need more content for a game, I think that is unavoidable. But I feel like a got way more than my money's worth out of GA. I played it for a few hundred hours, WAY longer than its thin content would have supported in almost any other game. I co-oped a lot with my samboer and it is fun sharing games with her. I think she ended up putting in even more hours than I did.

I used combat as examples because it is a pretty broad language on this forum, but you could apply similar principle to social, economic, and political systems. There are always trade-offs for dragging things around the concrete/abstract continuum, and these are all highly contextual based on the game as a whole and budgets. For me that is part of what makes designing fun, have discussions about where things belong and why.

Draegan_sl said:

Those are all good ideas, but like Denaut alluded to, you need to create the systems which those will be placed in. Are you hotbar based? Twitched based? All those ideas different depending on the ecosystem you place them in.

Proper design starts at the top where you conceptualize how your character moves and interacts within a game space. Perfect example is comparing WOW to GW2 to TERA. All different but they also have many similarities.

Then once you have that down, you have to implement how your character engages in combat. etc.

Then you can decide on how your character interacts with all those layers above, and then your topic fits in nicely. This is where Denaut (and I) have a problem with Mark Jacobs, because he skips everything and assumes everyone it talking, contextually, from the same point of view. Obviously, this thread tells you that's almost never true. He skips all that and gets into the weeds.

Click to expand...

On rerolled we are mostly just gabbing about neat things we'd like to see, which is pretty fun and this is a good place to do it as most of the posters love MMOs and understand them at a pretty good level. You get more interesting conversations that way.

I like to butt in with the "designer" perspective because I love my profession and I thoroughly enjoy sharing it with people that will appreciate it. As a side bonus it might help us all become better informed consumers.