EQ Never

those who find character creation to be a daunting task should learn how to tie their fucking shoes instead of playing an mmo.

Grim1_sl said:

Good points. But another added thing that helps is a reset button. Early EQ1 penalized players for making poor choices in starting stats. Stat inflation eventually made those decisions unimportant, but in the early game it mattered. If there had been a redo button somewhere, then many people would not have had to abandon their toons or just suffer through it.

The redo button doesn't have to be easy and cheap. I prefer something that takes effort in the form of faction, or hard to obtain items, to allow access to a redo/reset. But it needs to be there for all the reasons you stated. And not just for stats. Ability paths and most other choices that can have dire consequences to a character, needs a way out. This gives players a chance to play the game and know that they can fix their mistakes (with enough effort) if they make the wrong choices.

Given that knowledge, most players will not freeze at every decision fork, afraid to do anything at all.

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Lithose mentioned earning respec points. Sort of like earning AA points in eq. You earn respec points to adjust how your character developed. It takes time to get your character to exactly where you want them to be, but that's a good thing.

I think applying that to a stat system would be just about perfect. You either have your experience set to earn brand new stat points, or you use it to adjust previously earned points.

supertouch_sl said:

those who find character creation to be a daunting task should learn how to tie their fucking shoes instead of playing an mmo.

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Because Vanilla WoW really let people know that by picking a paladin they were going to be expected to heal the main tank and be a blessing bot if they decided to raid. Sure there were exceptions but they were definitely not the rule. It took a long time and a few expansions for some classes to live up to the skills trees they had been given at launch. None of that can be accurately conveyed with a 10 second tutorial.

It was only by getting to level 60 and finding out what did and did not work in a raid setting did people realize what was up. Needless to say, by then it was a bit late. If people could change classes or otherwise adjust their character to not be stuck in some pre-determined mold, that sort of issue would not exist.

However, people freak out that if you remove hard coded classes you remove diversity and everyone will simply become carbon copies of each other. This is not true at all. What people want are not hard coded classes; what people want are well defined roles.

As long as your game has clearly defined roles and objectives, and these roles require specialization to fill properly, then removing classes is not an issue. People will have to push their character to the limit to try and fill that role as best as possible. And as long as your system does not allow every facet to get maxed at the same time, these specializations will create different character types.

If you allow any mish mash of skills to beat any encounter, then it doesn't matter what people pick and they will simply go with whatever has the least down time. The objectives and content need to be challenging enough to require specialization to maximize character potential. Otherwise, whether you have classes or not, content will feel bland and pointless.

None of that has anything to do with how derp worthy a new player is while navigating the start up screen and everything to do with making a good game. Just that, one of those methods does not lock people in a tiny little box for the rest of their gaming career, while the other does.

Since we're armchair developing here, I always liked factions and the relations between them, as well as the restriction your continuing choices in the game impose on where you can go and what you can do. EQ started strong and drifted away from it, in EVE standings are a backdrop that is not as important largely aside from security rating.

Now imagine a faction system like early EQ where you start out with predetermined friends and enemies depending on character selection and change your place in the world from there, then add FFA PvP to that: A player can align with various NPC factions, maybe a limited number or even only one, and killing that player causes the usual PvE faction hit for PvP kills. But anyone can still attack every player, just that there are consequences for the attacker now. Would that curb ganking to a degree except by anyone that accepts being KoS in any towns he might come across? Shape some sort of team identity similar to hardcoded factions but without the restrictions? What pitfalls did I miss or what kinds of restrictions would be needed? Or is it a stupid idea best forgotten? It would require alot of care and attention to detail from the developers to get it right, but imo it would add many interesting facets to the game world.

Lithose_sl said:

No one is interacting with you because the game gives them no rational reason to. You inadvertently say it in your post. When you make the task in your game as simple as getting a cup of coffee, there is no reason to exchange information and form a bond. (Though you'd be surprised how many bonds you form at say, the bus stop or coffee line. If you get coffee every day, you might not know your vendor's name BUT if he was missing you'd ask "where is the X guy/girl?" where X would be a defining feature. Why would you ask this? Because your brain does jumps at broken patterns and attempts to rationalize them. That rationalization is an important aspect of growing bonds.)

Anyway. This is why there has to be a large breadth in the dynamic possibilities of your game. There also has to be large gulfs effectiveness--but not so much that it turns new players off. What does that mean? It means you have certain areas of your game that are there specifically for higher skilled or more knowledgeable players. These areas of your game should beattractive to everyone, but only really accessible to a fewAT FIRST. You accomplish this by setting it OUTSIDE the normal defined set of skills you've expected up until then.

In other words, you break the pattern--this forces people to attempt to evaluate new variables which they can use to create a new product out condition (A new lever). Some players will figure it out on their own, some will be forced to supplement their own problem solving with social learning. Which is why you have the reward be evident to others, whether that be the person slaying the unique monster in town (To be seen) or that he gets a bad ass weapon. You create a ritual, with the stronger player at the center and the others enjoined to him over the need to learn from him to repeat the process. (And just an FYI this is NOT the only type of ritual.)

To give an example. In your work, if everyone hates your printer...But you go up and magically make it work every time. Guess who becomes popular when everyone needs the printer working? You do. This dynamic information sharing based off of specialized knowledge is a key element in social interaction. And no, you're not going to inspire sharing through the collection of bare ass--you inspire sharing through breaking the normal dynamic by making your reward LESS accessible without social interaction (At least to the masses). The most extreme end of this is forced grouping, but there are far subtler ways it can be done that don't require throwing out all the time saving mechanisms in modern games. (The problem is the advent of those mechanisms has seen the completely obliteration of social formation--there IS a middle ground that was completely passed up.)

Writing it off as your game has to be collecting bear asses, is part of the problem of not designing with the expectation that social interaction will ever occur. And once more, all that leads to is highlighting the fact that you're playing a shitty version of a single player game, where instead of slaying the ultimate bad guy of doom--you're collecting bear asses and then bigger bear asses. And that's the problem. Games are NOT being designed with elements that make it rational to communicate.

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That is a long diatribe for saying that creating conflict or decision processes forms social bonds. First of all, you can't use real life examples like you did because when you have actual human contact you're already 100 steps ahead of anything you can do in the game. You're no long anonymous.

Second, I don't know what kind of gameplay you think you're going to create that forces you to talk to other people if you don't want to. Unless you're creating ingame VOIP and forcing it on players; players are just going to play the game or react with minimal directions.

Give me a game element that will make people more social? You're using the very basic game elements of collecting bear asses, when you're ignoring people calling zone chats for event spawns and other chatter you see in other parts of the game. Until you tell me how to design your game (and don't say designing it around camping a mob because that's retarded) you're just saying a lot of fancy words.

Zeus_sl said:

This post is so misguided I don't even know where to start. You.............played EQ right?

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I'm not sure what you're talking about. Perhaps you reiterate your thought process in words.

I assume you want to create the game where:
1. Players ran their own auctions and didn't have a AH. So you are forced to stand in some central area spamming chat for bids on an item.
2. You walked into a zone and you had to yell out to see what people where doing to join a camp group.
3. Combat was slow, so you were able to chat in between attacks for the most part. Spawns were so slow you often were able to have 5-10 minutes of conversation while waiting.
4. You stopped or others stopped to help you out!

Now I will rebut these points:
1. Players do actually run their own auctions. You can see, quite often, players sending out yells for trades or attempt to sell things quickly. This happens in almost every MMORPG I've seen including WOW, TERA, GW2, Rift etc.
2. I often see in GW2 people yelling out if there is a Dragon spawn. I see people putting together sPVP groups, I see people grouping up to do WvW. I see people running pug zerg groups in WVW. I don't play WOW now but I remember this going on for raids before LFR. I'm sure it happens now with world spawns, but I have no idea.
3. Combat is faster in todays game and most games aren't designed for you to sit still and wait for spawns. Plus any conversation is mostly being held on some sort of VOIP. So even if they are in your group, they are chatting with their guild about whatever. It's easier than typing.
4. Still happens to me in many games I play.

My guild chat is pretty active all hours of the day. I was running the 20-30 event chain in GW2 and there were plenty of people chatting it up waiting for the event to respawn. It was like the good old days of camping.

Shit happens every day, you just refuse to see it. C'mon, even WOW had Barrens chat.

I've actually been thinking about faction as well, and how to more deeply integrate it into gameplay. In particular, I've been thinking about the various class guilds (the Stormguard, the Academy of Arcane Science, the Lodge of the Dead, etc), and how much bigger a role it could play than just turning in a note and getting a tunic.

First, as you said, Creed, have players be considered part of their class/race faction for purposes of pvp kills. Maybe limit that to when the aggressor manages to kill his victim, and not vice versa, so that someone doesn't face faction hits for self defense.

Second, I wouldn't be adverse to some sort of personal story quest arc based on your faction; probably not one as comprehensive as the ones in SWTOR or GW2, but enough of a story to give a little extra context to who your character is in the world.

Finally, I've been thinking about things like specializations and subclasses, and about wanting to feel grounded in the game world, and not like just another game mechanic; factions were what I finally came upon as the way to do that. Basically, each class guild would have a particular subclass that it specialized in (wouldn't necessarily be a 1:1 ratio of subclasses to factions; each subclass could have a couple factions that specialize in it), and so once you got to the point where you could choose a subclass, you could either choose to stay with your initial class guild and learn their advanced fighting style, or go off and get membership at another guild for their class, likely requiring making a lengthy trip to another city and/or having to do a faction grind to be let in the door. This would encourage players to act in accordance with their race/class stereotype (by making the appropriate subclass by far the easiest to obtain), but still allow the player to go off the beaten path if they're willing to put in the extra work.

there was much more interplay in everquest. it's as simple as that. it's not an exaggeration to say that almost everything you did involved other players. you had to rely on people for transportation, you had to ask people for rezzes, and you could interact with other people's mobs. what's not simple is replicating that social atmosphere just by virtue of being in an mmo. eq was a little more nuanced than that.

Draegan_sl said:

First of all, you can't use real life examples like you did because when you have actual human contact you're already 100 steps ahead of anything you can do in the game. You're no long anonymous.

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First, that's not the only thing that forms social bonds. There are various rituals which can do it, yes conflict or cooperative events are usually at the center but the bond formation can happen at any point around them (Even if the original problem was not a facet of their social bond but simply a catalyst for their meeting.). It's not as simple and obtuse as "make problem=instant friends!"

Second, as for not being able to use real life examples. Once again I'll say the statement I've I staid from the start. Your goal shouldnotbe to create a game, it should be to create a world. In which you emulate, even if it's synthetic, the conflicts in life as much as possible. Yougiving upthat premise essentially diminishes any real advantage an MMO has over a single player game. You've lost the battle before it's even begun because your goals are so misaligned with the strengths of your genre. MMO's will never be as good in terms of gaming (Art, Variety, Environmental interaction, story depth, Variables) as single player game.Ever.

So why would you shift your focus away from real life examples, when it's obvious synthesizing real life social contact is theONE strength you have above all other elements of gaming. No, you don't have the thousands of physical cues that make social interaction in the real world extremely complex, but you can build systems to mimic them. Even very subtle systems can be made to take social cues into account and mimic the real world. (Answer me why you think shoulders grow larger on higher tier models? That's a social cue, mimicked in a game system--in this case, the art.)

Your goal shouldn't be giving up on finding threads of the real world in your game. It should be creating synthetic examples of them in your world, to mimic the conflicts and cooperation effects within normal life. And to facilitate the formation and repetition of social rituals built around those interactions. To dismiss the game as "not being able to do that!" is as myopic as an early game developer never attempting to make a 3D game because thus far they had only worked in 2d. The only difference here is recreating social depth, rather than visual (Like the transition from 2d to 3d did.) I seriously hope actual game developers aren't as limited in their ambition, otherwise we'll essentially be playing shitty versions of single player games forever.

Next thing you'll know they will add "story" that will be worse than the last generation single player game, something like KoTOR online...wait a second. Seriously though, this is the path the genre is on. Desperately trying to iterate on the GAME and not exploit the rich social struggles you can force in this kind of setting.

As for being "no longer anonymous"...Again, it should be the goal of your game to create the feeling of a reputation behind your character. Once more, your ultimate goal should be to mimic real life in a fantastic setting. Part of that is the consequences that come with having an irremovable reputation--and you add this through character investment, and by creating systems which make it rational for you to gain advantage through interaction that stems beyond one ritual.

Second, I don't know what kind of gameplay you think you're going to create that forces you to talk to other people if you don't want to. Unless you're creating ingame VOIP and forcing it on players; players are just going to play the game or react with minimal directions.

Give me a game element that will make people more social? You're using the very basic game elements of collecting bear asses, when you're ignoring people calling zone chats for event spawns and other chatter you see in other parts of the game. Until you tell me how to design your game (and don't say designing it around camping a mob because that's retarded) you're just saying a lot of fancy words.

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You're not forcing people to talk. You are making it rational for them to do so. That's the problem, if you can't be subtle and precise, you'll fall into the trap a lot of game developers do where they force their designs too far in one direction. There is no reason instances, soloing and bear ass collection (Quest leveling) can't exist in a game with community dungeons, group content and grinding. None. Except this fetish to push a "good thing" too far at the expense of design elements that were subtler in nature.

And I didn't bring up bear asses. You did. Zone chatter often doesn't reflect investment in the world. It's the same as a random chatroom and therefor doesn't invest you in the structures of the world. It's useless unless it builds on other systems to make the world comprehensive. The only point you make is for event spawns, which are good but in WoW, nothing during an event spawn compelled any kind of cooperation. There was no consequence, because it was as random and artificial as everything else. Which leads me to my next point.

Single examples of a comprehensive system as useless as a dick with no balls. If a social system, or element, is added to a game, without the world being built to accommodate it and make it rational to use--it will remain useless. But I'll go ahead and give an example anyway.

Community dungeons. No, these would not replace instanced dungeons. There would be a separate community dungeon with static spawns, higher experience and stronger mobs. The named mobs would drop non-boe items that could be freely traded, greatly increasing their value. Now, the arguments against this are many--like non-boe causing saturation (Making gear worthless) and botting. But I have an idea for a tiered economic system to combat botting, combined with difficulty in these dungeons. And also a plan for saturation by actually allowing it and keeping drop rates in line with saturation levels achievable at the next cycle of expansion (So, instead of forced obsolescence through stat inflation, you can literally just have gear that's a few tears old be very cheap through over abundance--there by making "catching up" to the current tier organic to the world..)

But I could literally write 5 pages in JUST making community dungeons work within a world. And that's before people asked me questions to iterate on it. Why? Because any system put in place to force rational interaction needs to be designed with the entire world in mind. You can't plop RealID in a world and expect people to form bonds. Your world has to be built to utilize it. And that worldwon'tever be built if developers don't believe social interaction is something game systems should be iterated on. Which leads us into the trap of constantly iterating a better "game" that will always be multiple generations behind the newest single player games, due to the complex nature of MMO's.

WTB port to Great Divided 50pp

Lithose that post was very long, and I'll reply to it tomorrow when I have more energy. Too much philosophical stuff in there. Suffice it to say, there is no substitution to being able to see, hear and touch another human that you can input into a game. There is also a line as to how far people actually want to emulate real life.

Again, you're talking a lot of abstract perfect world type of shit that when real life gaming gets a hold of it, it fails. You can't make a game where people are forced to care about being their avatar. Buying a game for 50 bucks or making it F2P or whatever, no one is going to give a shit on any scale to make your game a success. You're living in dream time until you can start making holodecks or some sort of Otherland type of shit.

Draegan, you are doing it again. I know you want something more than WoW and it's clones, and yet many times your arguments lead to an excuse for what we already have and are bored with.

EQ was more than a game in many ways. It was a living, breathing social structure that happened because of many reasons. Game mechanics and lack of voice chat were a huge part of that, but they were not the only reasons. And just because mmo's have evolved into this souless button mashing zombie experience where nobody interacts with the people you group with in any meaningful way, doesn't mean that is the way it has to be.

Mmos use to be more than just another twitch game. And they can be again. There is a huge market for a game that taps into that basic human need to interact with the people we are around. Having a game that includes modern twitch mechanics and promotes more meaningful interactions between players is not mutually exclusive.

Draegan_sl said:

Lithose that post was very long, and I'll reply to it tomorrow when I have more energy. Too much philosophical stuff in there. Suffice it to say, there is no substitution to being able to see, hear and touch another human that you can input into a game. There is also a line as to how far people actually want to emulate real life.

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Both of those things can be true, and yet what I'm saying can also be true. If your future post is just going to attempt to take my position to extremes in order to show that it fails on some level, then there is no need to respond. Yes, if you look at any extreme it's going to be bad (Whether you try to emulate real life too much or don't attempt it at all because you believe you can't translate enough sensory input from RL)....Again, my entire post screams subtleties, melting it down to extremes is going to miss the point.

However, if you get the point that this is an untapped sphere of gaming, then you should also understand that of course it's philosophical. EQ and other games scratched it's surface and since then, nothing has grown in this sphere, in fact as I've explained it's systematically been diminished--so it's never been tested properly (Except in games that literally weren't functional). It will take some iterating and adjusting to find a sweet spot. Just like it took some imagination to go from Pac-man to Wolfenstien, it's going to take viewing thesocial sphere as an exploitable dimension, rather than an after effect of simply being online.

You can't make a game where people are forced to care
about being their avatar.

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And yet I've watched people have little melt downs over getting hacked in some games. So, obviously you can. (Sorry to chop, I just wanted to respond to this point directly...It seems so absurd coming on a board where people were brought together 10 years ago by their avatar in a game.)...But on that note, no, you can't "force" this. If you have to 'force" anything, you're doing it wrong. You CAN make people addicted to their avatar--that's pretty obvious. And that should absolutely be the goal.

Draegan_sl said:

Buying a game for 50 bucks or making it F2P or whatever, no one is going to give a shit on any scale to make your game a success.

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Lithose already touched on it, but here we are, on rerolled, and someone is trying to convince us that people can't possibly be expected to give a shit when it comes to MMO's.

I spent abnormally long periods of my youth infatuated with the notion that there was a living, breathing, functional gaming world active all day, every day (except on Tuesdays!). While I no longer have the taste I once did, I still look back fondly on the countless hours I spent in the worlds of Felucca/Trammel (mostly Felucca), Norrath, and Azeroth - and, in that vein, I look back very fondly at the thousands of dollars I earned playing these games and simply selling items, characters, accounts. Shit, I took a four-week vacation with a friend through Europe with the money I made from WoW accounts come and gone - but this isn't about me, this is about people giving a shit.

I'm not sure how I can argue that point without coming off as a snide jackass, so suffice it to say I'm comfortable with the idea that people are actually craving an experience where they have reason to give a shit again - but you won't find me arguing for a second that players don't give a shit now. With the cupcake content they clear, and in the anti-social manner in which they do so, why the fuck should they? It's just another single-player avatar created, plopped in a world, expended, and thrown aside to try the next bigger, newer, shinier game that comes along. The only minor difference is that every once in a while you have to rely on other people to help you. And, much more often than not, it feels like aninconvenience. Compare that to when I used to go out of my way to resurrect strangers, and I loved to do it. They would so often respond with jizz-worthy delight, and often reward me handsomely with 100p, not to mention some rather vigorous fellatio performed on my e-peen. And later, I would often find myself in need of that person for help, and they'd respond in kind. Gladly so, even. What the fuck have MMO's come to?

I have never seen people so attached to a collection of computer-generated pixels in the way they were attached to their EQ characters. I'll venture a guess to that - the time that people incessantly bitch about spending, and the effort people incessantly bitch about putting forth, and the frustrations people incessantly bitch about having to put up with, the feeling of achievement, of accomplishment with not only themselves, but with others made it worthwhile. That character wasn't just those pixels; it was a symbol of what that individual helped friends accomplish as well - friends that person would have never otherwise met. Each character represented our respective gateways to an alternate dimension that allowed - nay,necessitated- a connection with others. It was a constant (and sometimes fucking annoying) reminder of the mantra 'all for one, and one for all'. Those sorts of connections, particularly in our increasingly anti-social world, have become noticeably more scarce. A world that presents challenges that people - shit, maybe even unwittingstrangersthat aren't in the sameguild(PERISH THE THOUGHT, I KNOW) - will have to work together in a strategic and meaningful manner to overcome, and in the process help to shape future friendships, is an inherently valuable one. Because, while the world might be fantasy, those mutual connections most assuredly are not.

So, yeah. I think the people an MMORPG truly captures, they kinda give a shit. I don't blame you for forgetting, though, because that kind of MMORPG hasn't existed for, at minimum, six and a half years.

Draegan_sl said:

Lithose that post was very long, and I'll reply to it tomorrow when I have more energy. Too much philosophical stuff in there. Suffice it to say, there is no substitution to being able to see, hear and touch another human that you can input into a game. There is also a line as to how far people actually want to emulate real life.

Again, you're talking a lot of abstract perfect world type of shit that when real life gaming gets a hold of it, it fails. You can't make a game where people are forced to care about being their avatar. Buying a game for 50 bucks or making it F2P or whatever, no one is going to give a shit on any scale to make your game a success. You're living in dream time until you can start making holodecks or some sort of Otherland type of shit.

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and yet that is exactly what EQ achieved over 10 years ago: making people care about the characters they created. i can tell you literally over a thousand different memories i have from playing EQ with my character, i can still name just about every item i had equipped, i can tell you the names of almost every guild mate and friend i had in that game even after a decade of not playing it. if that isn't creating a social environment and emulating real life then i don't know what is.

Community argument in it's varied forms and what to 'do about it' comes up more often then pictures of Jaits mom on /r/gonewildbbw.

What killed the 'community' of a game like EverQuest was simple and started happening long before WoW hit the shelves. Raiding became prominent which lead to guilds becoming more and more exclusive and introverted. Shit, as guilds got bigger cliques would form within the guilds. Fucking guild inception. And then these guilds start to fall apart as time goes on and most of the people only raid log.

First off the community most of you remember, 85% of the people who played EQ didn't participate in.

I'd go on by my kid just woke up. Long story short, you need to really think hard about essentially whether you want to break the guild structure up and why having no guilds would be superior for player retention.

Zehn - Vhex_sl said:

Community argument in it's varied forms and what to 'do about it' comes up more often then pictures of Jaits mom on /r/gonewildbbw.

What killed the 'community' of a game like EverQuest was simple and started happening long before WoW hit the shelves. Raiding became prominent which lead to guilds becoming more and more exclusive and introverted. Shit, as guilds got bigger cliques would form within the guilds. Fucking guild inception. And then these guilds start to fall apart as time goes on and most of the people only raid log.

First off the community most of you remember, 85% of the people who played EQ didn't participate in.

I'd go on by my kid just woke up. Long story short, you need to really think hard about essentially whether you want to break the guild structure up and why having no guilds would be superior for player retention.

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No, what you remember is isolating yourself from the server. Your playstyle didn't extend to everyone else.

On my server there was an ingame marriage once that was attended by a ton of people. Not everyone on the server was there, they couldn't be. But everyone was talking about it. A GM even showed up to help along the festivities. I heard of other marriages on other servers too.

Nothing like that happens anymore.

Nothing like that happens anymore because MMO's and the internet in general got popular. Have you ever been to a crowded mall or a walmart on the weekend? A fair amount of the population and I mean any population are not very bright people. Nature used to help with this problem with natural selection by killing off the very dumb people when they did stupid things out in the world but the double edged sword to technology means more and more of these retards can do even more stupid things and survive. Not only that they can do stupid things with no chance of death in the safety of their own home in a virtual world.

Back when EQ started unless you were tech savvy the average person didnt have internet and if they did it was not to play games or the games they did play were lans or shit like Case's ladder with C&C, etc. Now any dumb fuck can go out and get that shitty roadrunner yahoo DSL or the basic cable for like 20 bucks in most areas. Hell it was unheard of back then to actually pay money every month for a game so the ones that did were just a better class of people. Not to say there were not jackasses and dumb people playing but they were a minority where now you have to wade through 5 miles of really shitty DNA to find one person who remember to breath and "get out of the fire" without someone yelling at them.

For me thats why you will never be able to replicate that social element from EQ's hay day in any meaningful way.