Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
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It was on Shawn's Twitch stream. I'm sure they'll post it in the next couple days.
Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO
- Thread starter Flobee
- Start date
Quaid
Trump's Staff
- 12,048
- 8,427
Saw some of it. Same issue again.
Of the 7700 unique accounts played, 3900 (~50%) played 5 hours or less over the course of a week. 35% played 2 hours or less.
5 hours is not enough time for a new player to reach level 4.
Not entirely sure where this assertion Shawn makes that ‘the people who logged in this week weren’t MMO fans checking out the new thing, they were OUR fans’ comes from. These gameplay patterns don’t say that at all to me. MMORPG players don’t play three one-hour sessions over the course of a week in any game they care about.
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Goonsquad Officer
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i think embers had way less content, class design and level range by the time it released not-on-steam. i don't think they even had like...spellcasters right? it was just people doing fitan magic and inspirational leadership? Though embers was more...questchain narrative focused than mnm. and i think it did have like....2 (or 3?) very big dungeons to launch.
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Kriptini
Vyemm Raider
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Embers Adrift is specifically a "no magic" setting. There were three classes on launch, with each class having three specializations you unlocked as you leveled. It is not quest chain narrative focused (there were only a handful of quests on launch) and there were a few big dungeons, but they all used the same visual assets, which became pretty boring. It took them a few months before they made their first dungeon using new art assets. I do agree with you that Embers was definitely lacking in the content department on launch, though comparing it to the current state of M&M, M&M already has more content and more interesting content.
Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 43,997
- 155,306
Yeah, there was also something about these under 30 minute play sessions I think.
What it tells me is that people logged on, decided to look for a group, had no luck and said fuck it. Or logged in, looked around and thought "anything I do is going to take an hour to get going and I'm already bored thinking about it" and logging off.
Neither is good. I fall into the second camp with this game constantly. I'm bored, want to play something, and so load this up. I look around and think "fuck, I really don't want to deal with these systems and log off 2 minutes later."
Actually, this is what happened today. My 18 elementalist is logged out at the Glass Flats goblin camps. I logged in, decided I might grind out half a level. Pulled first mob, but it was a little early on the pathing so I got an add. Ran to the zone line nearby, and zoned out and back in. Mobs looked like they were going to take a good 5 minutes to saunter back to camp so I said fuck it and camped out.
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Lots of online games have these things called Daily Quests, where you just log in, do the daily quest, then log off. Sounds like what you are looking for.
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Kithani
Blackwing Lair Raider
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Flobee
Vyemm Raider
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Hateyou
Not Great, Not Terrible
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Embers had about as much content as Pantheon, which has about as much content as this, last I saw. I didnt bother to look this go around so maybe MNM has leap frogged along, which would be all the sadder, can't even get 3k ppl to login when its free I doubt their subscription model will be doing any better.
The point of course, is that its fucking retarded to not launch on steam, period. There is no world where you are better off trying to self publish through your own website. you are orders of magnitude worse. The only reason to avoid steam is if you are a fucking vaporware scam and you know it.
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I logged in for about an hour to create a wood elf and see the progress made to the Kelethin city. A lot had. It seemed playable with plenty of mobs and NPCs populated.
So I guess I fall into that 35% group that didn't play much. But I will play at release of EA. There's just a lot less reason for me to try to grind out some levels on a character that will be wiped especially when I can watch streams of people who are in different areas and different level ranges.
So I guess I fall into that 35% group that didn't play much. But I will play at release of EA. There's just a lot less reason for me to try to grind out some levels on a character that will be wiped especially when I can watch streams of people who are in different areas and different level ranges.
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Pasteton
Vyemm Raider
- 3,002
- 2,188
Ya I also fell off early cuz I know I’ll be playing this on release anyways and the lag on this alpha was often horrendous, sometimes unplayable in the city. They really gotta get a handle on that before release or they will lose quite a few people.
Feels like this game was designed for me, the zones are massive and there’s so much content relative to the number of people playing, that most everything is still a mystery. Friends of mine finding new quest chains randomly all the time. I like the mud aspects personally. It’s the game pantheon was supposed to be
Feels like this game was designed for me, the zones are massive and there’s so much content relative to the number of people playing, that most everything is still a mystery. Friends of mine finding new quest chains randomly all the time. I like the mud aspects personally. It’s the game pantheon was supposed to be
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Hadden
Trakanon Raider
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Vanguard and Pantheon were failures at implementing the EQ model - Vanguard being completely overscoped and undelivered and Pantheon losing direction almost immediately and floundering past that. Neither of them accomplished the charm and world feel of EQ and certainly don't have the same staying power.
Regarding social 'friction', it's the same as any other game mechanic. If you can freely fast travel around the world you're never going to ask anyone for a port, if you have GPS mapping built into your UI you aren't going to ask for directions, if you auto-rezz immediately you don't need corpse retrieval or rezzes, if it's faster to play alone you're unlikely to attempt to get a group together. If those mechanics seem boring and antiquated then I'd say it just doesn't cater to your gaming preferences - there are plenty of fast paced games in the market that serve high-paced, zero friction, fast rewards gameplay that only require socializing for raid content (in fact I'd say that's most MMOs these days)
It really was frustrating because those games have/had so many other problems than just mechanics that its hard to compare them to EQ. Pantheon being 10 years+ of dev time for very little return and Vanguard I remember buying a new computer specifically just to play the game only to still have it be a stuttering mess. Embers adrift had no magic and looked like it was trying to rival FFXIV 1.0 for copy pasta zones. They're all terrible games for reasons other than just mechanics.
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Hadden
Trakanon Raider
- 20
- 37
Agreed - I followed Vanguard and played some of the alpha when it was around but it didn't really capture anything close to the same feeling for me. Pantheon feels like a smaller scale Vanguard to me and the pace of development feels like a crawl at this rate.
I don't think anything is guaranteed with MnM but I feel like their trajectory is at least in line with what I'm hoping from a more modernized EQ experience that isn't just running a character on P99 or something (which I still enjoy, but it's the same content every time)
I don't think anything is guaranteed with MnM but I feel like their trajectory is at least in line with what I'm hoping from a more modernized EQ experience that isn't just running a character on P99 or something (which I still enjoy, but it's the same content every time)
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Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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I think this is where I push back the hardest. Framing Vanguard and Pantheon as "failures to properly implement EQ" is just another way of sidestepping the uncomfortable truth: maybe EQ's model itself was never sustainable outside of its very specific moment in history. If multiple projects, decades apart, with different teams, resources, and technology, all collapse when trying to recreate that template, at some point you have to stop blaming execution and start questioning the design itself.
And on the point of "friction equals socialization," I don’t buy it. There's a difference between mechanics that enable interaction and mechanics that simply force it through inconvenience. A lack of maps doesn't create meaningful social bonds, it just makes people tab out to a fan site or Discord. Corpse runs don't build community, they just add a chore before you can get back to the actual gameplay. When players remember their EQ memories, they don't wax nostalgic about begging for ports or spamming /ooc for directions. They remember the people. If a mechanic needs tedium to generate those moments, then maybe it was never about the mechanic at all.
A lot of the arguments for "friction" boil down to wanting the game to force other players to socialize with you. Ports, maps, corpse runs, none of that is meaningful interaction. It's all just leverage. It puts other players in a position where they have to talk to you, not because the gameplay naturally encourages cooperation, but because the game punishes them if they don't.
If you actually believe in social play, then the mechanics themselves should be engaging enough that players choose to group, trade, or cooperate because it's rewarding in its own right. If the only way you can get people to talk to you in a multiplayer game is by making solo play miserable, that's not proof of a brilliant design, it's proof that the design is leaning on artificial scarcity to cover its weaknesses.
So when people defend "friction," what I really hear is: "I don't trust the game to be fun enough on its own, so I need it to punish players until they interact with me."