Well, now what?

Itzena_sl said:

Hey James, remember when you said that the devs were right about making Cataclysm heroics & raids bollock-achingly tough and then WoW lost millions of paying customers as a direct consequence?

Good times.

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I started typing a response thinking you were talking about heroic raids... then realized you were just talking about heroic dungeons and regular raids. Christ man, ask James nicely and maybe he'll teach you how to wowz....

I'm sorry, you seem to think this point is up for debate. I am merely describingwhat actually happenedduring Cataclysm.

What made the best MMORPG experience ever (EQ1 pre-GOD) was PVP. Not red servers. PVP in the sense that I WIN, YOU LOSE.

Consider three fictional server-community members, Nate TheHero, Franky TryHard, and Timmy TenHours in an Up-Coming-Never-To-Be-Made MMORPG. In order to have meaningful interactions in our server community, there will need be winners and losers, and everyone in between. The following scenario illustrates this interaction on a basic level:

Nate TheHero was chilling at a market, drinking expensive ale, spending his fortune from slaying TheDragon. There he sees Franky TryHard and Timmy TenHours drinking decent ale and dog piss ale, respectively. At this point, Nate TheHero makes a comment:

"Hey Franky TryHard and Timmy TenHours, want some sweet l00t like me, bros? Well too bad, cause me and my 40 homies already slayed that dragon and he won't be around for a couple days."

This kind of interaction made the game FUN. A game that everyone wins at ISN'T FUN. However,that DOESN'T mean everyone has to be a loser.

But not everyone can be me, Nate TheHero. Thats because I'm a member of PowerLordsWTFOwnedYOU, the best 40 man guild on our server. We have the resources and coordination to play 20-40 hours a week, focusing on progression. We spend our time harvesting resources, which there is a finite amount of, and generally blocking Franky TryHard from getting on our level, which he and his guild so desperately want to do.

Maybe Franky TryHard is willing to accept his role as my bitch, as a member of Guild NoOneCaresAbout#2 on the server. It doesn't mean Franky is a loser. He probably enjoys putting in a solid 10-20 hours a week with GuildNoOneCaresAbout#2, getting nice loot and impressing the majority of the population, ServerRetards1.5k. He has adequate gear, resources and coordination to attempt all but the top 10-15% of raid level content. He wants to be like me, Nate TheHero but he can't because I raid with PowerLordsWTFOwnedYOU and we all play 40 hours a week, spending our time monopolizing the scarce and best resources, leaving Frank's level of content to Frank. Though once in awhile we're busy and Frank gets a MOB we actively kill, and starts believing he and his crew can actually compete with PowerLordsWTFOwnedYOU.

This bring us to the third guild on the server, ServerRetards1.5k. They play 2-15 hours a week, often times just exploring or knitting scarves or whatever the fuck Timmy TenHours do with their time. They still have good enough coordination and gear to accomplish 75% of all group and small raid content. Their gear is mostly adequate, and they can even pinch in for Guild NoOneCaresAbout#2, butnotreally for PowerLordsWTFOwned you. They still have plenty of content to play the game at their speed, and find enjoyment in progression. When they see a member of PowerLordsWTFOwnedYOU, they ask about their gear (which looks really cool and special, not sorta bland like their own gear) and maybe for a top of the line buff, which they generally don't have access to, because the spell is a rare drop from a top tier mob.

The point being made here is that diversity in community is missing in current MMORPGS. Make a game where not everyone wins and let the drama flow.

since we have a new forum now, i can't be banned by washed up game designers whose pussies ache because they and their company sold out.

this industry objectively fucking sucks in such an absolutely terrible and disgusting way for anyone concerned about real gameplay. if you just think for 5 whole minutes about the last 12 years and how completely wretched every new game released has been, and especially the complete casualization of EVERYTHING caused by WoW, you can't help but laugh in tears of total sadness... at what could've been had tiny timmy and sally soccer mom stayed on facebook instead of seeing ozzy whore himself on tv for a 'cool new game they should play with their casual friends!'

there's nothing coming out, and there hasn't been a true mmorpg since wow vanilla in 2004. everything else post-tbc, has been a single-player game with multiplayer options labeled a mmorpg in order to extract subs from people. now, those same fucking retard designers are saying nobody wants to pay for subs, so they make their shitty games F2P. hey, maybe it's because nobody wants to pay for a single-player game played on a server?

how about instead you focus on making worlds that are terrifying, difficult, and exciting? how about instead of worrying about how to appeal to every fucking retard under the sun, you make gameplay that's exciting to a small and dedicated group of people?

but it won't happen. titan will be a joke, as everything else will be once this industry has been totally devastated and hollowed out. maybe reborn, from the ashes... a glimmer of hope could rise... SMED?

Itzena_sl said:

I'm sorry, you seem to think this point is up for debate. I am merely describingwhat actually happenedduring Cataclysm.

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I'm not contesting your fact, but what you continually have a problem understanding is that somehow these stats you find apply to this very niche wow community we have (had) here.

Dumar_sl said:

there's nothing coming out, and there hasn't been a true mmorpg since wow vanilla in 2004. everything else post-tbc, has been a single-player game with multiplayer options labeled a mmorpg in order to extract subs from people. now, those same fucking retard designers are saying nobody wants to pay for subs, so they make their shitty games F2P. hey, maybe it's because nobody wants to pay for a single-player game played on a server?

how about instead you focus on making worlds that are terrifying, difficult, and exciting? how about instead of worrying about how to appeal to every fucking retard under the sun, you make gameplay that's exciting to a small and dedicated group of people?

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This needs to be quoted about 50,000 more times all over the internet in the hopes that someone will see it and decide to go for it. The only time I have bothered grouping with anyone in any mmo since vanilla wow was if I was playing with my brother or a real life friend (or the forced groups with absolutely terrible players to do dungeons due to LFD random, no way to weed out the tards, queues).

All MMO's prior to WoW existed in a niche market. WoW capitalized on Blizzard's established popularity and became the first MMO to eventually break out and go mainstream. Therefore it became the business model for pretty much every mmo that has been released since.

WoW has continued to add new features in order to remain relevant to players. Therefore each of these features are primarily concerned with customer retention and acquisition. Which translated means, the threshold to enter the game has continued to be lowered and the need to complete old content is removed. As the game has aged, the desire to make the game easier and easier to access has eventually eroded all but the last vestiges of the early niche market that WoW was inspired from.

This in turn has acted as a beacon to most new developers who continue to compete with the latest iteration of WoW. Therefore WoW's customer retention techniques have effectively watered down the entire industry.

So here we are today, everyone is in a race to the bottom, to see who can make their game the easiest and most 'appealing' to new players. Which translated means most new games that come out feel weak as hell, with an over emphasis on a shallow leveling mechanic and complete and utter lack of long term content.

Now, to finish my soap box rant in style I just need to tell you what my ideal game would be.

Things to Include:

-Responsive Combat.Combat should feel solid. Each button press and ability activation needs to feel responsive. No matter what system is in place, responsive action and animations are a must.

-Active/Reactive Combat.The player should be as concerned with the abilities of his opponent as they are their own. Enable effective counters and blocks that are time sensitive and require practice to pull off. This can be tricky given the latency issues found online but I do not believe it to be impossible.

-Diverse AND exclusive paths to develop a character.Everyone should not be good at everything. The more a character specializes into a certain role, the fewer roles they should be able to fill. This promotes cooperation between players as the most effective networks involve many highly specialized characters.

-More than just combat.Allow players to engage and develop their characters in a couple different spheres, such as economy, production, transportation and politics. Keeping in mind the above point, this may create some non-combat characters, which may sound horrible but really isn't.

-Emphasis on player knowledge and technique over stats.A seasoned vet playing abrand new charactershould utterly eradicate a truly fresh player using identical equipment. This is a much better player retention scheme than gear resets. An old school player coming back to the game will be able to be very effective with minimal gear investments and therefore the threshold for reentry is low. This requires a system with enough depth as to reward mastery of it.

-Meaningful large scale competition and cooperation.This really should be the beating heart of the game. Players should be encouraged above all else to work together within their group to overcome other groups of players or challenges. The best resources, rewards, loot, ect should only be obtainable through some form of cooperation. If this is not the main focus of the game, then don't bother making it an online title.

Things to Omit:

-Meaningless leveling content.If there is an end game, it should just be THE game. A day one, level one character should be able to contribute to a group of seasoned veterans in some way. Their effectiveness and abilities will grow in time, but there should be plenty of ways to "help" achieve a goal that is independent of character level.

-Emphasis on power modifiers such as gear and levels.A player's knowledge about how to fight, techniques to use in various situations, how to handle certain monsters, ect. should be where a player draws the majority of their "power" from in a fight. Gear should act as tools that open up different abilities and techniques and not as additional levels.

-Ease of access elements that obliterate the need for players to remember each other.LFR, LFD, cross server stuff. All of these elements cause players to forget who they just grouped with as the chance that it might happen again is so low as to be negligible. The game should be designed to draw people together over common goals and ensure that people keep running into each other again and again.

-Artificial barriers on players.Forcing players to engage the game in exactly the one and only way as envisioned by the developers is rather weak design. It requires the use of caps, walls, despawn mechanics, and a host of other things that just ruin people's fun. The majority of the fun in EQ anyways was trying to circumvent the dangers and skip straight to the good parts. A game should totally embrace that mentality and encourage people to completely negate challenges and barriers in any way they can come up with.

-Daily QuestsThe epitome of repetitive grind. The game really needs to be developed with a non static world in mind. Every time a player walks through the same region, the chances of having the exactly same experience as last time should be very low. There are many ways to achieve this but it should be a fundamental goal.

I am sure I could come up with a dozen more... but who cares right.

I found gw2 too boring to play but didn't it do nearly all the things in your list?

imo MMos are fun when you have friends who play, doesn't really matter which MMO or how shitty it is. Most of you have no friends who game anymore, QED you hate MMOs.

This god damn virginity metaphor has GOT TO STOP. Has anyone actually had sex before? The first time sucks. For just about everybody. I don't know anyone who gets super nostalgic about their first fuck. It is awkward, clumsy, and over too fast.

Haven't been staying up on what's being developed. I think it's pretty dry. No one has the money or tech to hang with blizzard anymore. Guess I'm just waiting on Titan. Although there are a bunch of mmos worth playing IMO, secret world is good for story, wow for raiding and ganking, gw2 for semi massive pvp. Myself due to personal stuff I haven't had a chance to play most of the new mmo stuff hardcore, so maybe that's why those games still have something to offer me.

Itzena_sl said:

I'm sorry, you seem to think this point is up for debate. I am merely describingwhat actually happenedduring Cataclysm.

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You're half describing an inaccuracy to get a point across that's retarded and contrary and makes 0 actual sense in the context of any sort of discussion on game design.What actually happenedduring Cataclysm is that Blizzard funneled a bunch of terrible baddies into content they weren't ready for and the terrible baddies got rightfully upset about it. The dumbing down of LFD aside, this is why they're talking about actual progressive raid content again, because this funneling mechanism isbrokenandretardedandbad for the game.

Eat that shit.

I am no longer the target market for AAA MMOs. Conversely, if you transported my mid 20's self back to March '99, I'd never pick-up EverQuest. I'd be talking about some MUD I'd been playing since I was 12, and between gulps of mountain dew, I'd be complaining on lycos about 3d graphics ruining the dungeon crawling experience.

GW2 did do a lot of those things, but they failed to give their end game any meaning. WvWvW is only there for bragging rights and nothing else really, it provides measly benefits for the server. The 1-80 game had some interesting exploration, but it didn't require any cooperation. People did help each other because there was no barrier to, but everyone was essentially running around solo. Dungeons became a mess with classes having no well defined roles and fights became pretty disorganized.

They did do a lot of things well, but tying WvWvW to the server more directly, (like have actual zones on the server become the battle ground. Depending on whether you win or lose determines what happens in that zone until it comes up again in the rotation) and having more well defined slots and roles for characters to fill in parties would have gone a long way to improve it.

Combat should have enough mechanics to keep things diverse, but not so many as to prevent strategies and tactics from forming. If there are 100 thousand different types of attacks and ailments, it's pretty hard to keep track of things and develop a plan. A really good dungeon crawl should present challenges like mini puzzles. Each hostile group, or pack or obstacle should have multiple solutions and some of them should not involve combat. The group that makes the most effective use of the tools they have on hand will get things done quicker and suffer fewer defeats. Having fights turn into crazy ability spam fests is pretty boring and unrewarding.

Whoever brought up Graal, *thumbsup* That little fucking game was a blast in the early 2000s. Nowadays I just play on the BC private server I have linked in my sig, gets 2000+ people online at all times of the day sometimes, the raiding and pvping at 70 are blizz-like and gives me shit to do when I feel like playing a game.

Itzena_sl said:

Nah, subs are back up to over 10 million now.

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Right after an expansion? Wow, surprised! The fact is that all of WoW's design choices since TBC haven't really had a huge impact on sub losses. Harder/Easier is pretty superficial in the grand scheme of things. I'd day fast content generation has a far, far bigger impact than difficulty (within reason) on sub retention. And I'm not really disagreeing with you about "easy"--on an individual level TBC and Vanilla were far easier than WoTLK/TBC. I think individual easy is good, with higher social difficulty being the limiting factor. IE put the emphasis of work on the officers/core group of the guild. And then let them bring whoever they want to fill the gaps--this formula works because it's essentially the basic structure of nearly every common social group, ever.

TBC and Vanilla were great because of this. You still needed a strong guild, and a great core of players to do the more difficult content. But there were large variances in the difficulty--so more than half your slots could go to weak players and that was a GOOD thing. It let you bring the dopey pot head that was average DPS, but made the guild laugh. It made it so you didn't have to be a complete dick about who your friends were just because you wanted to do content--but it also kept enough difficulty that you had to keep your eyes peeled for exceptional players and it still allowed guilds with great cores to excel faster. So, yeah, I don't think their constant raising of the difficulty is good...I don't think them lowering it is good either, though. I think the best solution is allowing enough wiggle room in encounters, by NOT scripting everything to death, to allow for stronger players to carry weaker ones. Weaker players get to see content, stronger players get to be little heroes, cliques get formed for great drama, and best of all--a broader amount of players can play with their friends without these artificial dividing lines of difficulty.

Which leads me to my next point--I don't believe it's nostalgia making us cynical about MMO worlds. I think the biggest issue with MMO's today is developers who have God complexes. Every small facet of the game, both good and bad, is controlled. Oh--this epic sword isn't difficult enough to obtain, so we'll make you defeat boss X, which requires Y APM, at least 20 times before you can get it. This epic sword is too difficult to obtain. Lower the amount of precisely choreographed actions per minute required to obtain badges, and slightly tweak the amount of badges required to obtain, and make the pommel of the sword drop more often.

Everything from the loot, to the boss mechanics is controlled on the smallest of levels. Nothing in the world feels natural, or special, because everything has a puppet string attached. Sometimes simple and open is just...better. And that's not to say scripting, and molds/badges and LFD don't have their places, they most certainly do...All of these things are great in an MMO. But there comes a point where you can smother a world by pushing a good thing too far. Not every fight needs to require a guild to dance a psychotic ballet, not every piece of loot needs to come from precise placement in progression. Throw some curves, make it feel like there isn't a developer hand stuck up the content's ass. Let your developers flex their imaginations. Let PvP be a little imbalanced because some asshole camped for 99000 hours and got a lucky drop. Let some guild's main tank still wear his Dire Maul BP in Black Wing because his luck was shit. As long as these things are offset somewhat by the "control" systems, it's OKAY. The problem is when a developer makes any of these nuanced, "real" feeling frustrations be completely eliminated by artificial systems, you brush away any character your world has. It's left sterile, with no flaws to make it real, to make the "good" feel natural. (And I'm not saying it has to be ball breaking hard to make rewards feel "earned"...I'm talking about how a world feels more real when everything doesn't work like a god damn vending machine.)

I know this is pretty abstract stuff...But it's pretty simple. Being perfect doesn't give something character. Just the same as something being super-difficult and requiring huge time sinks doesn't give something character. There is a balance there that the developers are missing. I think a lot of their problems come from wanting to create a "perfect game", rather than a "good world"--the two things are very subtly different, but they are different. And the difference is not Theme Park Vs Sandbox, Sandboxes can be choked out with developer smothering too. It's more subtle than that...Games need that element of table top DM/Story teller back...That overriding desire to build a world of your own, and not a desire to control the characters in it. WoW is full of great game designers, I just don't think there are many great world builders left though.

xzi_sl said:

I would love for MMO's to get away from leveling as a "progression" system. All anybody has done since BC WoW was rush to max level as fast as they can to try to get in some dungeons and possibly raids. Nobody actually pays any attention at all to any quests, nobody cares what zone they're in aside from the one that has the biggest quest hub, and nobody does any content inbetween really.

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It sounds like what you want is Eve, but in fantasy form. Asherons Call 2 was an interesting idea, as well. It'd be nice if Turbine updated it.

The problem is MMO fantasy gaming is a one size fits all experience.. As far as levels, item levels, and tiered gear well, that makes this design easy to manage and simple to implement new carrots. The problem is how do you change that and make people still want to cough up 15/month?

I think there are some cool new quests that came out with Pandaria, but by and large the overall gaming experience isn't that much different and I personally would love something new and innovative. I doubt we'll get that from Blizzard who does what they do well, but will wait until someone else has a cool new idea to steal it.

xzi_sl said:

I just want my character to be more involved other than logging in, doing some dailies or some PvP, and logging off because that's what I'm accustomed to for the last 4 years with almost every MMO I've played.

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I think the answer isn't necessary getting rid of levels, but moving more towards player generated content. The problem with that is large successful MMO companies want complete control of everything. While player generated content enables a lot of potential, it's a headache for retaining that control, and it also nullifies the need for 40 dollar expansions and perhaps even 15/mo subscriptions.

Even Star Trek Online with it's 30 subscribers refuses to really give up much control with it's player generated missions.