Rift: Planes of Telara

[Modern Angel]

So copy that (instead of doing something better), and people will quit that game to play yours for no fucking reason whatsoever.  Oh wait...

Who said anything about whether someone should or should not copy it? I'm pointing out how fucking stupid it is to claim that it's a requirement to make a good and/or successful game, as you and Dark Mel Gibson have variably done. It's a complete fallacy that it is a requirement to be a critically acclaimed game. It is a complete fallacy that it is a requirement for a company to launch a successful game (unless you define success the same ass retarded way you do, as I pointed out pages ago). It is a complete fallacy that it is a requirement to be successful solely in terms of PvP.

I have no doubts that it was fun and interesting and defused several population problems. It's not something to latch onto and rub against your crotch for ten years. It's the goddamned Trammel argument of diku games.

[pxib]

It is interesting that nobody major has attempted it since, though. I assume it exacerbates the ubiquitous cries of favoritism from the fans. If I recall it was fairly obvious that Britain (all areas and quests complete) was made before Midgaard (most areas and quests complete) was made before Hibernia (large chunks left unfinished years into the game). More players get upset that you're wasting time working on content their favorite characters don't get to experience. And that's before we get to discussions of class, race, and terrain imbalance.

If it were really the robot Jesus of fun and profit it would probably have been emulated by now.

[Ingmar]

Well more than half the DAOC servers had dysfunctional RVR because of population imbalances. 3+ factions is fun for a lot of reasons, certainly, but 'it helps with population balancing' is not on that list of reasons, despite what people seem to keep parroting over and over.

Sure, there are plenty of arguments to be made about *why* people tended to pick Albion overwhelmingly as their realm compared to Midgard and Hibernia, but it doesn't really make a difference in the big picture - it is essentially dumb luck if you end up with a balanced population between factions, whether there are 2 of them or 20 of them.

The 'sucessful' PVP models get around this by letting players essentially create their own factions and fight over things on their own; that's the only model that has ever really worked long-term.

[Ratama]

3+ factions DOES help with population balances; every problem DAoC had with 3 RvR factions would have been worse with only 2 (not to mention RvR would have had much less potential).

Of course

letting players essentially create their own factions and fight over things on their own

is a better model.  But if you use premade, dev-generated factions, 3 or more hardcoded factions = demonstrably better than 2 (especially considering instanced PvP content you que for).

[rattran]

Except that it's not provable. Perhaps DAoC would have had better pvp with 2 finished realms. We can't know.

[Ratama]

I can't recall an MMO with 2 hardcoded sides that had better reviewed/acclaimed world PvP than DAoC did with 3.  I guess it depends if you consider preponderance of evidence 'proof'; even that gets to be an issue once you take into account years since launch and whatnot.

It is interesting that nobody major has attempted it since, though. I assume it exacerbates the ubiquitous cries of favoritism from the fans. If I recall it was fairly obvious that Britain (all areas and quests complete) was made before Midgaard (most areas and quests complete) was made before Hibernia (large chunks left unfinished years into the game). More players get upset that you're wasting time working on content their favorite characters don't get to experience. And that's before we get to discussions of class, race, and terrain imbalance.

Mythic publicly said they made the three DAoC realms separate, despite it being more work to make PvE content in triplicate, to make each faction feel more unique and add replayability.  I dunno if that's actually why they did so.

Anyway, someone could make a 3 faction game with said factions all sharing the same zones.

If it were really the robot Jesus of fun and profit it would probably have been emulated by now.

You'd think so, but look at how many dev teams deliberately ignore lessons learned from previous MMOs.  Dev personal preference seems to play an overly large role in these sort of decisions (at least, I can't think of any other reasonable explanation).

Blizzard finally figured out that 50% MS effects are a shitty PvP mechanic after 4+ years and who knows how many billions of reps and examples; sample sizes that virtually any dev team would kill for to draw data from. So... guess what the standard healing debuff% in Rift is.

[Ingmar]

3+ factions DOES help with population balances; every problem DAoC had with 3 RvR factions would have been worse with only 2 (not to mention RvR would have had much less potential).

Actually the problem where 2 large factions repeatedly pulp a 3rd non-competitive faction into the ground every night for 2 years would not even exist in a 2 faction game. So no, not every problem.

[Stabs]

WoW has very much trained its players to look out for Number One. This is important when looking at RvR, specifically when looking at RvR in the post-WoW world.

Any new game will find its players shopping around looking for the best deal for them personally. The idea that it's cool if Albion and the chivalrous and noble folk who reside therein beat back the forces of Barbarism is an idea for relatively hardcore players.

Modern players have an approach to their MMOs akin to supermarket shopping. They have no loyalty although what is called "loyalty" can be gained by paying them points, they do not feel part of a team with other shoppers and the aim is to get the most back for what you put in.

DAOC was buttressed by a lot of hardcore player outlooks like voluntarily joining a faction because it's an underdog; seeing the game as a team game; and immersing oneself in the "patriotism" of one's side.

I think a genuine RvR MMO will have to do something quite brutal with its incentives. Possibly no individual rewards except for your side winning (which works pretty well in sports like football). Rift won't be that MMO and won't try to be.

[Shatter]

MMO's would be great if it wasn't for the f*cking players

[Ratama]

3+ factions DOES help with population balances; every problem DAoC had with 3 RvR factions would have been worse with only 2 (not to mention RvR would have had much less potential).

Actually the problem where 2 large factions repeatedly pulp a 3rd non-competitive faction into the ground every night for 2 years would not even exist in a 2 faction game. So no, not every problem.

Back then, with only world PvP/RvR, no.  In modern MMOs, with BG ques, yes, at least that problem is helped by a third faction to even out ques.

And FYI, there was a WoW server that was something like 40-1 H/A 80's (it was a PvP server to boot, iirc).  So yeah, the situation you described has actually been worse in a 2-sided game.

[Lantyssa]

With enough servers, there could be a DAoC server where one side had 90% of the population, too.  While I like games with more factions, that in and of itself will never solve imbalance problems.

The only way it is possible is either Aion's method of forcing, which is poor because of other effects, or making NPCs to balance out any differences in population which are as capable as players in all respects.  Or make NPCs the bulk of the forces if not as smart, with players being able to mingle.  That might work of a Warhammer-like game, or the RTS-from-first-person-perspective, but individual accomplishment will feel non-existent.

[Ghambit]

You could also make the factions so generic as to not be able to tell them apart aside from their labeling.
And also let the players choose sides after playing for a while, rather than at chargen... effectively disconnecting race/class choices from political ones.
As for BG's, I think it's kind of silly even HAVING more than one faction if that's your pvp system.  You may as well be fighting your friends if a vanilla battleground is the extent of your pvp.

[ghost]

Realm balance will only be accomplished with direct intervention by the MMO administrators.  Whenever people have the option they will choose the side which gets to kick ass.  I think a third realm would probably help make this balancing activity more interesting, but it wouldn't spontaneously allow for balanced factions.  

You could also make the factions so generic as to not be able to tell them apart aside from their labeling.

I thought they did this with Aion.

[Rendakor]

Except most servers on Aion were heavily weighted toward the lighty side.

[Ard]

Which is funny, because that's the exact opposite of how Aion started.  Same with Warhammer.  Both games flip flopped population wise after about two months after most people fled the games.  This probably more speaks volumes of the mentality of the people who stay after launch and are inclined to pick the pretty side though, than anything.

[Merusk]

The same happend in WOW beta as well, I believe.  Testers were all pretty much Horde, which is why some PVP groups chose Alliance only to find they couldn't ever get any action because there were so few Horde to kill.

[sam, an eggplant]

Blizzard finally figured out that 50% MS effects are a shitty PvP mechanic after 4+ years and who knows how many billions of reps and examples; sample sizes that virtually any dev team would kill for to draw data from. So... guess what the standard healing debuff% in Rift is.

That's a gross oversimplification. Throughout the lifetime of the game healer mana was effectively unlimited, healers used their fastest-casting heals all the time and often didn't bother to hotkey the slower ones, and heals healed for so much damage that huge degrees of overhealing was common. Given these factors, a 50% healing reduction debuff made sense in PvP-- otherwise you could never do enough damage to actually kill anybody. Heals were just too powerful without the debuff.

Even with the 50% healing debuff, burst was king and sustained damage held very little value, which disenfranchised the sustained damage classes relying on DoTs, etc, in PvP.

In the newest WoW expansion, healer mana is tightly limited and healers that use their fast-casting heals will run out of mana very, very quickly. The heals they can afford to use have long cast times and don't heal for very much, maybe 10-20% of a player's health per cast. Given these fairly significant changes, reducing the healing debuff makes sense.

I haven't played enough Rifts to determine healing's relative power versus damage, but since they copied everything else from WoW circa 2006, I feel fairly safe in assuming they have a similar healing model.

[Ratama]

FFS, please don't sound like MS was a carefully implemented tool to reign in PvP healing; that had nothing to do with why it was implemented, or how it lasted so many years in that form.  WoW Warriors had MS because a dev threw a fucking fit after Nurf's video got the old 31 pointer nerfed in beta.  Nothing to do with reigning in healers in general, everything to do with making a dev's pet class a PvP god.

The old healing/healing debuff dynamic was broken by Blizz's admission (an admission only made after 5+ years and the old devs having mostly moved on...).  Copying the old & busted dynamic = pretty fucking stupid.

[Ingmar]

FFS, please don't sound like MS was a carefully implemented tool to reign in PvP healing; that had nothing to do with why it was implemented, or how it lasted so many years in that form.  WoW Warriors had MS because a dev threw a fucking fit after Nurf's video got the old 31 pointer nerfed in beta.  Nothing to do with reigning in healers in general, everything to do with making a dev's pet class a PvP god.

The old healing/healing debuff dynamic was broken by Blizz's admission (an admission only made after 5+ years and the old devs having mostly moved on...).  Copying the old & busted dynamic = pretty fucking stupid.

It's impossible to take your opinions seriously when you resort to the 'dev's pet class' bullshit.

[Paelos]

Nothing to do with reigning in healers in general, everything to do with making a dev's pet class a PvP god.

Don't do this again.

[Hawkbit]

My understanding was that RIFT was not allowing mods/addons.  I see that I was misinformed, as there's an 83 page thread about a damage meter mod in the general forums.  Does anyone have an official statement link from Trion about mods usage, please?

Mods, in and of themselves, aren't so bad.  Sadly, I watched WoW design their encounters around those mods being nearly must-have.  Once that happens to RIFT, I'm out.  I'm not playing that game anymore with addons and crap.  In fact, I'm also not going to try to compete in an economy that has gatherer/auction mods accessible.  

I don't really care if the majority of people want them or whatever; the game is good, but it's not good enough to make me put up with that crap.  

EDIT:  I must have been out of the loop for a bit... seems as if Draegan's site is hosting a mod.  Bummer. 

[March]

From the public non-beta official forums:

There have been a lot of questions about Rift and the use of Add-ons. We'd like to clear up where we stand on this issue.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding our position on Addons and other types of UI modifications, so it is not at all surprising that a reasonable person would think that we are universally against them.

It's true that RIFT at launch does not have any API support for addons. The reason that we have chosen to go this route is the same as we publicly described when we unveiled the game in early 2010.

Whenever we consider adding a new feature to RIFT, we first and foremost want to make sure that we ship and support it at high quality. That's the primary yardstick we use. If we can't, we will tend to hold off until we can.

Supporting Addons, Skinning, and other UI Modifications in a way that is of sufficiently high quality, stability, and in a way that does not allow for the creation of automated play (e.g. bots, which are inherently a negative to the overall experience) was not a task that we could afford to take lightly. Instead, we chose to provide a robust, attractive UI that players could customize in many ways.

As we work toward the future of RIFT, we will be looking to provide new ways for users to customize their experience, through more customizations and possibly all the way through addons and skinning -- To us, the issue is primarily one of providing all features at the proper quality that RIFT players deserve.

Draegan can explain in more detail, I'm sure, but it appears to me that the RJ tool is just a log parser running in parallel and on top of the (windowed?) game... not technically an API add-on.  I've no idea what other data might be exposed for this sort of overlay, but I very much doubt it will be anything like WoW (or even LoTR) modding.... until Trion officially exposes the API.

[Ratama]

It's impossible to take your opinions seriously when you resort to the 'dev's pet class' bullshit.

Don't do this again.

Don't do what, post publicly known information about a dev's tantrum and the results thereof?

[Modern Angel]

No, don't be a tedious fuck anymore.

[Rasix]

It's impossible to take your opinions seriously when you resort to the 'dev's pet class' bullshit.

Don't do this again.

Don't do what, post publicly known information about a dev's tantrum and the results thereof?

29 of your last 31 posts have been in this thread and pretty much all negative.  Hell, that's over 20% of your entire posting volume.  Give it a rest.

[Ashamanchill]

I think it's kind of silly even HAVING more than one faction if that's your pvp system.  You may as well be fighting your friends if a vanilla battleground is the extent of your pvp.

i think that's a bit over-reductionist. A lot of people (my self included) actually LIKE instanced BG style PvP, and further more, enjoy that it is an 'us vrs THEM' mechanic. To simplify it toy 'you might as well be fighting your friends' may make sense on paper, but i think it would lose a lot of folks in the game. I know, when I PvP with my buddies, Us is Us and Them is Them, whether it be in a BG or in the real world. It's one of those things that made WoW, WAR, and Aion worth playing.

[ezrast]

Draegan can explain in more detail, I'm sure, but it appears to me that the RJ tool is just a log parser running in parallel and on top of the (windowed?) game... not technically an API add-on.  I've no idea what other data might be exposed for this sort of overlay, but I very much doubt it will be anything like WoW (or even LoTR) modding.... until Trion officially exposes the API.

Yeah, as I understand the parser is a separate process that doesn't affect the actual game. And yet whether or not to include an actual in-game DPS meter is an issue of huge controversy over on the official forums. Because apparently people who use meters are bad and will destroy the community, somehow.

In my 3 days of beta I found the stock interface to be mostly acceptable, but I really hope they get on with allowing us to reskin the unit frames. I'm very picky about mine, especially when I'm healing, and the default frames didn't even show my own buffs and HoTs on raid members (that I could find anyway). Madness.

Also, is there click-casting? Modern Angel said so back on page 49 but I never found the option for it.

[Hawkbit]

Because apparently people who use meters are bad and will destroy the community, somehow.

If only people using meters could shut the fuck up about how much they're owning everyone else, then fine.  But God knows people on the internet can't shut the fuck up about how awesome they are.  Then come the gatherer/auction addons and the economy gets hosed by fake daytraders/goldfarmers.  And so on... 

Look at the GW2 thread; they're trying to keep people looking at the world instead of the interface.  It's one of the major nostalgia issues with EQ that I have... there was a magic to the world that for me, at least, wasn't made up of ilvls, gearscores and parsers.  Addons are all about squeezing the last drops of life out of the %s of anything in the game.  I got sucked into it in WoW and I don't want to do it in the future.  WoW ceased being a world at some point and became a math problem, because if you aren't performing at peak numbers you're a 'bad'.  And you get kicked (looking at some of the folk from the WoW threads on this very forum).  Can't we just play the game?

I realize I'm fighting a losing battle here, but at least want to give the game a shot without mods.  I wager I'm in the minority, though.  A year or two down the line this will likely be just another math problem.

[ezrast]

UI mods to me are mostly just about organizing information available to me in a reasonable fashion (meters are a mild exception, though I do feel the pros outweigh the cons in that case). Case in point: the Void Knight class has a "pact" resource which is implemented as a stacking buff. You can have up to 10, and they fall off if not renewed or expended within 30 seconds. I make important combat decisions based on how many pacts I have and how long it will be until they fall off. But since they're just a buff, the UI throws them in the corner of my screen to get lost among minor 1-hour stat bonuses, HoTs, and on-next-attack effects that expire within a GCD. My pacts don't stay in the same place, don't stand out, and can't reasonably be put near the center of my screen.

I'd like pacts to be displayed near my energy and attack points. In this and a dozen other cases, using an addon isn't a matter of dumbing the game down or turning it into a mathfest. The stock UI is just shitty and needs fixing. And I doubt the devs will be the ones to fix it.

[Shatter]

An MMO that requires addons means they need to improve their design.  WOW had boss fights where addons were a virtual req't...without them the raid stood almost no chance of success...bad design.  WOW also had a raid UI that didnt work as well as many of the addons....bad design.  Then DPS and aggro meters came in and people stopped caring about paying attention and having fun and moved to elitist DPS output, spamming that shit in raid chat after each fight and often pulling aggro from the tank just because they can.  From there it turned into a tool for guilds to beat up low DPS players and push the elitist assholeness from a player level to a guild level.  This is how addons were 3 years ago when I quit WOW so I can imagine how much more they have ruined the game since.  F addons

[Speedy Cerviche]

anyone want a rift beta key? first to reply affirmatively I will PM it to.

[Modern Angel]

Click casting is in the process of being put in. I think you can make the mouseover macros but the actual functionality isn't fully implemented.

Shatter: You're pretty wrong about add-ons. Well partially wrong. There's plenty that should have been in WoW that wasn't. As for the dps meters and the "elitist assholeness"... sorry? Here's the thing: a raid boss is a math equation. Every single one of them. You have to do X damage in Y time, where Y equals some combination of a hard timer, boss damage output, tank health and healer mana. The only thing DPS meters handed people was a measure of what X was. That's not a bad thing and it allowed WoW to come up with more creative mechanics because they weren't worried about X being an unknown anymore. This is quite aside from the fact that DPS meters aren't "allowed"; there's no way to stop them, when you can just take your damage log and run it through a program to see who's doing what. You can't stop that unless you shut off the game mechanics from people entirely.

My mantra's pretty simple in these games. The most hardcore thing you can do is suck. I have, since finally getting over my fear of scary "hardcore" players, done more in less time than I ever did in three years of hanging out in "casual" guilds. While my casual guilds were putting in four nights a week to kill one boss a month I have, since mid-TBC, been putting in one or two nights a week to down roughly a boss a week. I know which one was more hardcore.

[AcidCat]

The fact that these games are math problems is the absolute worst thing about them, how it all comes down to numbers. I do my best in all these games to pretend it doesn't - never used a single addon in wow for example. I guess that only works because I have never been interested in raiding, so I've never had to live up to some efficiency standard set by other players. Fuck that, actually. I want to play a game that engages my imagination, not a number-crunching simulator that engages my calculator.

[Shatter]

Having to do X DPS in Y time is a design flaw, not a need for DPS meters.   

[Sky]

I agree completely with MA, and just took the next logical step to 'not bothering'.