f13.net

I was reading the Tabula Rasa thread where due to the ending of the game, they are letting everyone become massively uber early with epic weapons, armor and 2000% xp gains. While I did not play TR after the first 30 days, I did experience the same thing when AC2 closed down (ah the eggs, still have finger cramps from all the clicking).

But it made me wonder why devs/studios do not make a game where you can become very powerful like this early in the game (perhaps not quit that easy, but very easy nonetheless).

Do not get me wrong, I understand the logic behind the proverbial dangling of a carrot, the longer you take to level and achieve the longer you stay subscribed. And there is also the problem of characters out pacing the content, so devs fall back on artificial speed bumps and long grinds to keep people in check. But

I will not argue against this model, but I have to think that there is a market for a game to let you become a badass very early in favor of another mechanic. I would hazard a guess that a not insignificant number of people sub to a game, play for a few months, realize they cannot keep up with the poopsockers and quit. How about a game that evens this out a bit while still providing end game challenges? Let me explain.

Warhammer would have been a great example of this, let the player level to max EASILY and get above average near epic quality gear early. WAR was never really designed as a PVE game like WOW so let the character breeze through those levels and get attached to the character. Now once you reach max PVE level (40 in WAR) then add tons of PVP mechanics and content to keep people playing. This could potentially rival the sub retention of the current treadmill model by making you INVESTED in your now legendary/epic character.

I mean are you not less likely to quit if you have a killer epic'd character? Plus when you get bored and take a break (like we all do) it is easy to come back and level a new character quickly to try a new class, new abilities, et al.

WOW is starting to see this to a degree but I am not sure WOW would be the perfect game for this mechanic. A super hero game that also emphasized PVP would do well with this model.

I just think that all MMO developers tend to follow the path of proven success and for good reason. However that does not mean that are not better ways to make game more enjoyable for the consumer while still protecting your sub base.

Like Guild Wars you mean?

Out of your 56 posts how many of them have been used to start threads?

I have no idea, did I break some post/respond ratio unbeknownced to me? Please point me to that rule and I will do my best to maintain that ratio.

A better question would be, does answering this question in my own post count to lower said ratio?  :grin:

I am no expert, but I would think that posting a longer thoughtout question on a subject that interests me and I believe others, would be reacted upon more favorably than responding to said post with an off topic question that seems to be targeted at causing drama.  :uhrr:

But again I am no expert.

The perfect reply here.

Hats off to you.

Draegan is probably just pointing out that this is a discussion that's been hashed out many many times on many of these forums. It might also fit better under Game Design and Development.

But to answer your question of WHY... because most devs and the lead designer/producers who control them are unoriginal little shits still trying to recreate the perfect D&D game from when they were 12.

So is your intent to be max level quickly/not deal with level based systems, or to feel powerful?

Because the two are entirely separate on a design level.

If you're curious go search through the WAR threads, there was actually a serious discussion on it somewhere before MJ griefed us with his presence.

IIRC, people could reach the level cap of AC2 in a couple of weeks.

They got bored and quit.

For the sake of pedants everywhere: 8.

Sliding Scale.

Incorrect... I played AC and then AC2 and the grind was horrible. Took me the better part of 5 months to reach level 50 (cap). I remember it as a hellish grind, at least as compared to most of today's MMOs.

When I used to play lineage 2 private (hacked, free) servers, there were quite a few that were very popular and had just this.  Uber weapons, 10000x xp/loot/etc drops.  It never really appealed to me, when I played l2 I would grind to the top, pvp for awhile, and then get bored and quit.

You were doing it wrong. 

Perching + buggy monster pathing + quest exploitation ftw.

meaningless if you don't also count the posts where he is responding to a post that he created.

It could be fasta. Tabula Rasa is a good example. I didn't even know there were different versions of the chaingun, pistol, etc... weapons until they started dropping as uber loot.

I remember exploiting the shitty mob pathing, and hitting the cap in the first week or so after release. Those tyrants that got stuck on small bumps in the terrain were awesome.

Don't forget the people who afk leveled using turrets.

Didn't UO do all of what you describe years and years ago? It wasn't that hard maxing your skills, and you could easily buy player-crafted armor-sets that were of equal quality of what 80% (*pulls random number out of a hat*) of the other players were wearing. It wasn't even all that hard to get hold of the super-duper accurate weapons of supreme player vanquishing, though most people would just keep them in the bank and use GM-quality player-crafted weapons.

I'm remembering UO as the game where everyone macroed to max skill level. Perhaps I was misled.

I think those first few weeks were the best that the game ever had. It was when they nurfed the hell out of chars that many decided to quit. I was more or less done when they scrubbed runcasting.

Being too powerful would get old eventually. But in a lot of games that overpowered feeling is what everyone is striving to reach.
Maybe if there is more to the game than just reaching a certain level of power then retention could be kept just by enjoying the fun.

I think you're all looking at this the wrong way.

The games like AC2 where people reached max level and quit due to boredom, lacked engaging endgames.

The games like EQ1 and WoW which people have played forever, had endgames that hooked people. EQ1 had a single endgame (catass raiding), WoW has multiple endgames (catass raiding, small team raiding, battlegrounds, endless questing, or endless trading - OK EQ1 had some of those, but the implementation sucked so for most it was raid or quit).

I quit EQ1 because I hated putting time into long, boring levels and flags every time an expansion came out, to qualify for the fun stuff. I quit WoW because Burning Crusade required me to grind long, boring keys etc, to qualify for the fun teamwork (I know that has changed, but my life has moved on).

I also quit SWG at the Combat Upgrade (CU) when they added a levelling grind to qualify for the good stuff, because I had been playing crafting for PvP as an endgame, and I now needed to spend ages re-qualifying for a lesser version of what I had already mastered. I didn't play UO,  but I gather it had the same kind of endgames as SWG (i.e. everything except catass raiding).

OF COURSE people quit if there's nothing to do after a quick levelling grind. But if WoW or EQ1 had ultra-fast levelling and then offered people the same long, complex endgames we know them for, what difference would it make? I think 90% of the time people have spent on those games came AFTER max level.

If there are complex, engaging endgame paths to follow, slow levelling is a useless annoyance.

Endgames are a flaw in the body of a game.

They got bored and quit because the game had a) almost no end game content worth playing, b) what content it had was pretty lackluster, and c) the game had no replay value because so many of the class trees were borked.

Not that I ever played it, but from everything I heard Shadowbane would have been better off if there were no leveling at all. Same with WAR. If it's not a PVE game, why make them do PVE?

If there is no end game in an MMO the maximum amount of content is simply: length of time to reach max level X number of classes, and thats assuming people want to play every class.

Does not seem like a way to keep people around for years unless you can somehow pump out content at a truly miraculous rate.

Hey, look there's a forest. Stop looking at the trees.

Maybe the problem is mmo has become a level-driven system that most people want to jet through as soon as possible to get to the end-game content? I've been playing EQ2 since launch and never come close to the end-game, and there's tons of content. Aren't there enough games following the tired old formula of grind asap to the cap and raid?

Of course, I actually read the quests and like exploring things without a map.

I'd say the problem is half the system, half the players.

Theres a small flaw (http://disney-clipart.com/incredibles/jpg/syndrome-incredibles.jpg) with that plan.

Ideally the 'end game' would start as soon as you'd finished the tutorial.

Nice! *adds to list*

It's a pretty fucking simple concept: people tend to level grind like mad until the endgame, scarcely paying attention to the content.  When they reach the endgame, there isn't much content and what exists is a wall of cockblock.  Decrease the amount of game devoted to level grinding because people aren't paying attention anyways, and increase the amount of quality content where people are more likely to pay attention, then you can ease off the cockblock at the endgame because there is more content to exhaust.

This would be lovely and make more sense in a lore-centric world, too.  Using WoW, you hear about the big threat of Darkmaster Gandling, but then wonder why the level 68 elite guards can't just go in and rape his ass.  He's only level 20.

  If all mobs were at the same power curve, then you have whole swaths of lore to explore and each threat is still able to be seen as a threat, instead of "oh fuck I'll just outlevel this and come back to it."

  I hope someone does it sometime, though I will miss my level grind.. something soothing about it. 

That's everyone a few months after the game comes out anyway.

That seems to be the general thrust of most FATE-based games, as best I can tell. Spirit of the Century certainly works that way. You start at max level, with all your cool stuff.

What's the point otherwise?

Not sure that translates well into computer games, though. SotC is all about story and character.

The question is: if you take away leveling, what replaces it as a progression / reward structure? Players love ding gratz for a reason.

I don't think leveling is bad. I think the stratification of most level based system is the problem. Look at WoW's 60 and 70 raids, that are now obsolete except for achievements and bragging rights.

Guild Wars seemed to work with being able to unlock new skills and secondary professions.  There are probably other things that could be done, like the achievements which would mean more if you still had to work for them, or creating a loot system like Diablo where it's really random instead of pseudo-random.  There is always unlocking new factions and areas.

It's not that characters cannot progress and get better, just that after ramping up under such a system, it isn't so much about leveling as it is increasing the breadth of your character.  The game would likely need to have a solid, interesting story though.  Something to make the players want to continue on.

You don't have to take away levelling and din gratz moments, you don't need to start everyone at maximum power level, you just need to make sure that everyone from the new guy who just rolled his first character to the vet who's been subbed since launch are all playing the same game. Not a game with the same name but the actual same experience.

But in games where you level grind up and then play the max level content for months/years, very little time is actually spent on ding gratz in its levelling form. Fight win gratz and loot gratz are the dominant reward.

Hehe, I guess it's that time of decade again...  :grin:

Every game has some sort of personal display of power. It's just what that power connotes that matters.

In a diku, your entire ability set is strictly based on level. So you want more powers? Go get some more levels. Oh you've run out of levels? Ok here's a new level grind. We'll just call it Keys/Tiers/Progression/Reputation Raid/Grinds. So many people think there's a difference between leveling up and Raids that they miss that Raids are merely more leveling up, they just have the old skool required-multiplayer random-drop grind component we all say we've hated since the early FOSS/Sowboot camp days.

In a non-diku, your abilities are based on how you line up various advancement tracks, or how you spent skill points. Same difference as far as I'm concerned. You're either grinding skills (UO, old SWG) or playing the light strategy game of skill planning that is Eve so the computer can do it for you.

I still think Planetside had one of the better systems. But the damned thing wasn't successful enough to inspire emulation.

So I say forget all that and focus on how players go about advancing.

• You want players to care about the story? Give them choices to make. No game really does this as well as an RPG, and we've devolved below even EQ1's factions. It's certainly possible though. It's just hard.
• You want players to care about skill? Drop autotarget locks for one. Maybe DCUO will work.
• You want them to not gun through to the endgame? Well, that's niave and undeliverable, so just ensure as many people as possible can get to that point and want to stay there. Ala WotLK.  It's only called "endgame" because it's at the beginning of that phase that the game has ended for some, due entirely to design.
  
• Or you can maybe go with player society stuff like old SWG and UO as player-driven endgame. But that's hard.

And AC2? Really?

 :awesome_for_real:

Nothing. We will enter the brave new world where players play your game because its fun.

COD4 is fun. One of the best FPS games out there. Levels.

Levels are just an abstraction. You are motivating players to improve and giving them a method to measure themselves. You want people to not be overly concerned by levels, see the second post above yours  :grin:

I think your confusing non-grindy horizontal growth with grindy vertical increases in strength repackaged and delivered in 7 different flavors each time a new mmo comes out. Levels has about as much to do with COD4 success as frosted flaks have to do with a well balance breakfast.

*edit I was coming off a 2 hour session of l4d when I responded to you...

What's a frosted fleck? If you meant Frosted Flakes, read the nutritional info sometime. You'd be surprised.

Grinds are a mindset. Levels are merely a measure.

COD4 didn't require levels. But they put them in anyway. Ever wonder why? (besides, it's not about the levels, but rather the achievements, anyway).

For the lol's? Does it matter? It's a fps, as long as head shots register 90% of the people who play that game are happy. But if you want to talk about mmo's again what developer of any post WoW game hasn't basically design their game around the "grind is only in your head, levels are just to nice tokens of your accomplishment" logic. I mean TR, WAR, AOC got that down to the letter. (wonder why their still grindy pieces of shit though  :oh_i_see:)

I play MMOs that I find fun. But would I pay $15 a month to keep playing CoD4?

Levels act as content gating mechanisms and also as a sense of where your character fits in the world. Getting to that next lvl is often a point of celebration or motivation to keep playing a bit longer. Just getting another skill point or skilling up isn't usually cause for excitement, plus it can be a lot harder to design a MMO environment that actually caters to the wider variety of character types that can exist in non-level advancement mechanisms.

I'm all for the lvling mechanic to not be the be all and end all of character progression / major reward points, but we need to be well aware what we are losing in the exchange.

Abso-toutley. I love sandbox games, and yet wound up playing WoW a lot.  :awesome_for_real:

And even our sandbox games have had leveling mechanics (SL and worlds like it aren't really "games" in the tradiitonal sense).

And yes DLRiley. Activision and Infinity Ward added levels to COD4 just for the hell of it.  :roll:

Would anyone want to $15 a month for a fps. Besides the fact that if your paying $15 dollars a month for the current mmo's on the market you have problems. Lets get this clear, if the bolded is true, which it is apparently then mmo industry is not just behind single player/co-op games, it's plain dead. There is no reason to honestly jump from the game your playing now, which is most likely a grindy piece of shit, to a new game, which is most defiantly a grindy piece of shit. If levels and the ding factor is the only way to trick players into thinking your game is worth $15 a month than making a mmo is about as a losing proposition as it was 10 years ago when all we had was EQ and UO because no one really thought that industry had any feesible future before we start using virtual reality as serious graphics engines.

Think of levels, reward, ding as stepping on dog shit. Normally when you step on dog shit you usually say something along the lines of "I stepped on shit ton of dog shit!". To the untrained ear it sounds like your complaining about the amount of dogshit you stepped on, which is true, but totally misses the probability of your response being any different if you stepped on not a ton of dog shit. For instance if you stepped on a small pile of dog shit you would probably complain anyway and in the same fashion "I stepped on a shit ton of dog shit!" even though it's not a shit ton. What your complaining about is not really the amount but the fact you stepped on dog shit. The only way you can get someone to step on dog shit and not complain about it is if the amount of dog shit is so minuscule that you barely notice it. But the problem is you will eventually notice it and you will complain about just as much as you would if you stepped on a large pile.

How the above relates to the game industry is quite simple. The cute new thing in the mmo industry is to pretend your game isn't a grindy piece of shit and hope you hide the hoops and ladders well enough that the players are jumping and climbing them without noticing. And it works just fine because it follows the logic that all the hoops and ladders are actually necessary and all you really need to do is to ensure their not as fun sucking, tedious, boring, as the mmo that got released before yours (basically making the dog shit as small as possible). Besides players will eat it up if you explain it to them and most players will ask for that new mmo to set up that way. The problem is that players DO notice get bored go back to the mmo they played before. Even more sad, a player leaving your game because its a grindy piece of shit never  articulates the reason why they quit your game as " I left your game because its a grindy piece of shit" simply because people are so convince that banging out the ding and loot is the only way to keep them playing. Which ultimately doesn't and if it does, your basically married to that mmo and you won't try anything beyond that without the "am I really going to divorce my old mmo for this" coming up constantly every time you caught yourself waiting for the next ding/reward (which is quite often...).

Darniaq if levels met that head shots don't register 100% of the time like it would in an mmo, no one would be playing Cod4 multiplayer. Honestly all levels do in CoD4 is make sure when you own a newbie he knows how leet you are in case he didn't stick around to see you teebagging his corpses with a high powered no noobs allowed to use rifle in hand. In a genre known for its 13 year old with a 30 year old sized epeen, levels are just icing to a cake that is already frosted and has fudge filling.

Removing the process of "becoming powerful" sort of negates the prime motivation to continue to play. Power is relative to environment and other characters. If you begin "powerful" what metric are you using to judge your characters advancement? Whether its levels,gear or skills its still a progression tread mill that is the prime reason most people will sink 100's of hours into a game.

Its also a convenient tool to judge where/what you should be doing in the context of the virtual world. Power is the reward for investing months of time and hundreds of dollars into a game. Comparing a FPS which mostly based on the physical skill of the player to an MMO is a bit specious. Having complex skill systems (which is just a more complex version of level grinding) makes a given game less accessible to players. It also makes it far more difficult to develop content for players. Most players seem to prefer having a guided tour experience as opposed to just being set loose in a world and making my own place.

I would imagine its infinitely more difficult to create a world that negates a characters personal progression while having enough content to keep players invested in the game.

I was under the impression that what most WoW players enjoyed was the quests and the leveling.  At least most of the people I know who still play it get excited about the expansions adding more quests to do and more levels and more gear and stuff.

Is the endgame raid content seriously experienced by more than a tiny fraction of the WoW playerbase?  (This is a serious question -- I honestly have no idea here)

You mean an MMORPG. Planetside was an MMOG.

In any case, getting more powerful is fine and dandy, as long as you realize the weaknesses of a level stratified system. It usually comes out in PvP (Where great hoops have to be jumped through in order to balance out combat effectiveness, like segregated battlegrounds) and has negative concequences on socalization, where friends cannot play the game together in a satisfying manner.

I bet the number of players participating in raiding is much larger now. I'm done with questing and leveling in WoW, and couldn't wait to get through Wrath's pre-raid stuff and start raiding again. It felt like a big cockblock, and I wouldn't have minded if they just threw all the non-raid stuff in Wrath out. I have collected spleens and broken open cocoons and delivered care packages for 70 levels. I didn't need to do it all over again.

The environment and other players also increase in level as you progress.  Zero sum is zero sum.  Borrowing from WUA here: fuck that noise.

The environment progresses because that is the mechanism used to progress the character... Other players are not progressing in relation to my gains. They are progressing due to the investment of time and money in the game.

There is still a large distinction between a powerful character and some casual who plays on the weekends. It remains a zero sum game only if one is investing a comparable amount of time as their peers. Stop playing and you become weak in comparison hence further motivation to play continually. If there was no distinction in power and accomplishment between a noob and a poop socking no lifer the motivation to sell ones soul to a game lessens significantly.

A metric of accomplishment for /played is essential to keep them pumping in time/money.

Yeah, they love it because it means there's one less level they have to grind through now until they get to the endgame.

Hey, I used to love ding, gratz as much as the next guy.  P&P games programmed me to like it.  The difference between leveling in a P&P game and an MMO quickly became apparent to me though.  Leveling in an MMO typically just means you get either an upgrade of an ability you already have or you get a new ability to throw onto a hotkey and add to your regular rotation of abilities.  I wouldn't have a problem with dikus, or leveling, or lack of uberness, or raid content, or whatever other issues people tend to have with MMO's, if the basic gameplay didn't remind me of a game of Simon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game)) where the buttons always light up in the exact same order each time.

This is one of those times when someone ask why an mmo can't be design like an actual game and everyone response tells that person that if mmo's were designed like actual games they would implode under the weight of their own fail. You see in most non mmo, wait more accurately, all of them your "progression" in game is actually determined by how good you are at the game. Hence real games get harder the longer you play while mmo's insist that the game gets so easier. In a real game you go from "hey I was a noob" to "hey i'm getting a hang of this" to finally " hey I'm pretty damn good" and maybe the egoistical " I'm there best their is". The only thing that was increased there was the players understanding of the game, their reward is increases success. Of course if this model was implemented in a mmo, they would all implode under the weight of their own fail, so lets ignore gaming design 101, and use psedo game design rules. It's as if mmo gamers are the mutated sub-species of normal gamers, where all the things that piss normal gamers off in real games are the bread of butter of mmo's.

As far as skill systems vs level grind, if your skill system is series of hurdles over "skill points needed", "skill level increases", " advancing your skill tree", "class levels", than sure a complex skill system is simple another attempt to hide the dog shit you stepped on. However if your complex skill system is really a very simple set of choices that allow the player to find their preferred play style by letting them pick and swap skills and is pretty much a very practical extension of character creation of the non-cosmetic-frivolous type than skill systems than your not talking about another vertical increase in power. Of course when mmo's implement "complex skill systems" it's all ways the former and never the latter.

Quinton as far as WoW players enjoying the grind that's simply due to them being married to the game. How many of those WoW players who love the cockblocks would actually play another grind/loot/reward/ding game that is not free is the real question. The answer is of course few to none, their playing WoW obviously till it becomes an unpopulated desolate world where only the people who really enjoy the end game are going to be left. The I love grind kids will move on to find an another mmo to get married to. Just like the UO kids are still looking for UO2 which means the retention rate for new mmo's might become even worse if WoW suddenly collapses.

This part is correct. Planetside without a monthly fee might have been more popular, but I wouldn't say by a whole heck of a lot.

This part is not :-)

You can pick up any weapon you find in COD4. You just can't create a default template with that weapon until you've unlocked a number of achievements, themselves granted to you by XP and levels. Wanting to have those weapons yourself is a prime motivator to have levels. But it's not a linear power scale. An M16 with a laser site, stopping power and deep impact can be as effective as a P40 with an AGOC and the same permabuffs. Yes, you can't pick up the better grenades nor that AGOC scope from the ground, because those are locked behind unlocks. But you can pick up a weapon that someone modded to test drive it.

The important point is that your player skill can trump your opponent(s)' level. THAT is the key difference between an FPS with MMO components and an MMO with an action-y feel (ie, TR). You can be level 1 and still be effective, because level only limits your default options, it doesn't arbitrarily prevent you from picking up "higher level" weapons, because weapons themselves do not have level requirements. You can still be crushed, but that's more because of player skill that would find you being crushed in any FPS. :grin:

That's why I've long wanted an actual MMOFPS. But COD4 is close enough (and presumably COD5, though I prefer modern warfare for mp) for me right now because it includes the kind of things I'm used to from MMOs, without being arbitrary and punitive about it.

That is actually the million dollar question. MJ said very little I have ever agreed with but when he mentioned that his game might have been better received if he added 120 levels to max (with the same time) people would have reacted differently to the grind.

He is right.


Well that and remove some of the suck... :ye_gods:

Come now, I forget to mention the weapon pick and hence I'm wrong? Please the no newbs allowed statement was simply a reference to the fact that no new player actually gets those guns in the beginning. And while I agree with your post entirely actually, it still missing a vital point. Say 3 newbies enter COD4 multiplayer;

Newb 1 enjoys the game thinks its a blast totally oblivious to the fact that his m16 sucks and may occasional utilize the advancement system as he gets more comfortable with the meta-game.

Newb 2 plays the game but is feels that only having a m16 vs much better guns is a more than a tad unfair and simply stops playing (even when someone tries to explain to him that the difference isn't really that bad) .

Newb 3 plays the game notices that his gun sucks (probably doesn't help that he sucks too) but instead of raging thinks to himself "well geez all I gotta do is play for x amount of minutes and maybe an hour and I'll defiantly get the new shit I need to win" (probably in his case attempting to compensate for the fact that he isn't that good) and continues to play the game in order to get the new parts/guns.

COD4 doesn't really need even 250k players playing it in order for it to function. But lets say you were to boil it down, on average you can expect a 2:3 retention rate (simply by the generalization made above). Not bad, but Newb 2 would have probably stuck around to play a bit if he wasn't given a series of unlocks to work through in order to get the gun he feels he needs to compete. Say Newb 2 doesn't leave but simply plays less, not devastating but it could be improved.

The levels would have to be meaningful in some way - he couldn't stick advancement points every 10 levels and believe that people would find leveling fun under such a system.

The suck is why people don't play - not the number of levels.

Pulling numbers out of your ass does not prove your point. You're wrong on a lot of different issues, picking up on only a single point is only unfair in that it's unrepresentative of how much your arguments suck.

Im having a hard time reading your posts so i might not be responding correctly. Not being a dick i also have horrible grammar/sentence structure.

I think you have to understand that "leveling" and other similar ways of character progression are not restricted to MMO's.
Pretty much in any RPG i have ever played you will be progressing in the exact same way. Either through skill usage (TES/UO) through acquiring items/gear or outright level dinging. Its not a new concept and isnt limited to MMO's. And to say there isnt a skill curve in even a game like WoW is a bit false. You start off a piddly little wizard with limited skillset. You progress in class knowledge and skill availability. And then by the time you are max level you begin to learn how to play your class in a raid/pvp setting.

This system allows for even craptastic players (of which comprises a majority of people) to compete and acquire prestige via gear.

Making a game based solely on physical player skill puts a impenetrable cockblock for a large swath of your potential customers. Shit, even in WoW people constantly bitched about being unable to attain epeen rewards. How can you get a large customer base to pay a monthly fee for getting their shit pushed in?  

Im willing to make the baseless assumption that you cant maintain millions of subscriptions where individual player skill is the sole metric of player progression. Very few people can accept being outright dominated by those who have skills that they never will. A majority of people will not pay to play a game in which their own physical limitations (reflexes,aim etc) are the limitations of the cyber escapist persona

Not at all. I didn't think you missed that :-) I do think that we are prioritizing those aspects differently though.

Your three Newb examples are apt. But only for the first week or so of the game, because they're coming with some sort of preconceived notion.

• Newb 1- Probably an FPS background. Comfortable playing with whatever he can get, motivated to try and get better in skill. Sees an advancement system so has a clearer individual path to better weapons than the old school "learn the map/spawn points" thing.
• Newb 2- This may occur, but I wouldn't think so unless the person comes from a strict RPG/MMO background and immediatley assumes Levels = Powers. But that person wasn't going to stick around anyway because they probably suck at FPSes for the short time they're looking for targetlock and healthbars :awesome_for_real:
• Newb 3- Here again, unless they've grokked the diku paradigm, I don't know that someone who plays COD4 is thinking Time = Advancement. Because the biggest gate isn't the time invested causing mob genocide. It's all about the kills you get or CTF/bomb objectives you achieve.

There also is a fourth: the experienced FPS player looking for a new game. They land and find there's also an achievements system. Not their prime motivation of course.

But all of that only works in phase 1 (launch/adoption). Looking a year out, I think COD4 has more concurrent matches going than the sequel. And that's one reason I've been focused on this:

Imagine COD4 with achievements vs COD4 without achievements. Which one retains more players for longer? I actually don't know. But somebody thought they did, so they added traditional MMO trappings as a way to give it a shot. And with FPS games that have followed, we see this tactic used even more.

And this is why I love it. The only way "MMO" evolves beyond the same stuff we've been playing for 10 years is if someone with a completely different point of view comes in and gives it a shot. Even Blizzard didn't do that. What they actually did was to show the world what it takes to do the old way right.

I continue wanting to look outside to see someone do it different. :-) And so far, one of the better examples of doing it different is by not starting with the "RPG" suffix.

I find the concept of unlockables in general and specifically to multiplayer FPS's to be one of the most retarded ideas i have ever come across. Yes it will get players to play longer. Just like any cockblocking grind in any other genre. Does it add anything to the gameplay besides the ability for a company to nickle-dime to avoid such a cockass feature? nope. Does it ensure that some people wont even touch the game? Yes.

So beyond the artificial extension of content via cockblockery what exactly does this add to a game? I must confess i have not touched CoD4 multiplayer nor followed the game. And i am pretty much a PC centric gamer with little console exposure.

"Power" in most RPG's are a sliding scale, your not REALLY more powerful than you were, because everything else is too. Well, except for that level one rat. Poor guy will never advance.

When i play level based games, or enter a new zone (as they are level based too), i know i'm on the bottom rung of that...uh, measurement.

You only become weak in comparison if people come back to your lowbie zones to rape your ass.  Similarly, you only become strong if you go back to rape other's asses.  The game is zero-sum unless you acknowledge that a significant portion of people are willing to break from the mold and go back to a lowbie zone to get their rape on, at which point you must concede that the carrot and stick has limited effect over their behavior, otherwise they would be grinding to endgame.  Either way the argument has little merit, because counter-examples abound.  Obviously then the reason people play isn't to become "more powerful".

EDIT: MrBloodworth's is like a TL;DR of my post.

Wait you are claiming that all characters have equal "power" based purely on level? Im not sure you are aware of the distinction between a noob gear character and one maxed out. Lets just say they are far from equal.

Since the vast majority of people are going to be in level-equivalent gear, and the content of that level is designed for people in their level-equivalent gear, it's already factored into the system.

Again, you only see a power differential when compariing people at different levels.  In a PvP game that means people won't have fun.  In a PvE game it's a pointless comparison because you need to compare the player to the content, not the player to other players.

Still zero sum.

I seem to recall my max level epiced out character stomping mud holes in other max level characters. Likewise my equally well geared friends being able to defeat PVE content that not many had the ability to. Whether this large of a discrepancy in relative power has been removed for WoTLK I can assure you it existed for the first 3 years of WoW.

Gear tiers are another type of leveling. Yes, if all else is equal (including player skill), gear can and is the determinant.

Howevr, the probability of gear being that determinant is far more rare though, when compared to levels/abilities, and the use of VoIP. This is because the time-to-gear in the post-cap game is much longer than the time-to-level thay preceded the cap. It bascially takes a lot longet for people to catch up, and for devs to move the cap for top tier players faster than slow playeta can catch it (ie. WoW arena gear). It is for this reason that players experience other types of disparity more often.

Except of course that anybody regardless of skill or activity will eventually reach the level cap. Gear progression was (Have not played since BC) in no way shape or form guaranteed and is in fact purposely restrictive. From WoW's launch till when i quit playing in BC my guild had huge gear advantage over every single other guild in the game. A vast majority of the games population did not even have the option regardless of playtime to even attempt to progress.

So i find the concept that "progression is a zero sum game" to be pretty blatantly false. I believe there was 2 guilds on my server who were making any progress in naxx. And only the one i was in cleared it. The disparity between a player in "level appropriate" to a stacked t3 character was huge.

I'll reiterate what I said:

"Since the vast majority of people are going to be in level-equivalent gear..."

You're a statistical outlier.  You've stated you're a statistical outlier by saying most people aren't at your level.  There will be a small fraction of any game which is above or below the content.  The bell curve shows that most are not.

You put the time in to get the gear, which as Darniaq said is another type of leveling, and are effectively not stomping over level equivalent PvE because you're now fighting below your level.  You're fighting at level + T3.  That's into Raid levels.

Ok well if you are going to equate any disparity of power for any fucking reason to mean level disparity. There isn't much i can say to refute it. You said at an equal level two level 70 players will have level equivalent gear and that would make them the same in the power metric. And that's just untrue as i have elaborated.


But that power discrepancy exists in various degrees. While i was using the most extreme discrepancy to demonstrate a point. Take ANY semi-organized raiding guild and the players in them are going to have significantly better gear than the green clad baseline level 70. And in some time periods the higher "tier" gear was not always a straight upgrade over an easier to acquire loot. So while a large leap in content curve. Your mix match set was sometimes superior to t3.

Im not really sure on the average userbase of a fairly big server. But ill venture the tentative guess that all the semi-organized raiding guilds comprise enough of the active server population to be a bit beyond a "statistical outlier".

I dont really see a game working in which no form of character progression occurred. My point was that equal leveled characters are not created equal. To dispute the "start everyone at 70 cuz its just the same!".

Depends on the game, not all games give you 70% of your stats from gear.

First, the use of the term rape is extremely offensive and you should fucking stop it.

Second, you're talking pvp. Most people play pve. In pve games, as you level up, you become less able to easily take on even-level content alone, because of the way hps and abilities scale.

Got a more descriptive word for ambushing people who have little ability to fight back for the sole purpose of enjoying their misery?


Umm... No.  Unless you want to call elites and bosses even levelled content.

Steamroll, bushwhack, overpower, stomp, crush, smite, gank, destroy, obliterate, curbstomp, butt kicking, ...

Hold on and I'll get a thesaurus to look up more.

I prefer monkeystomp.

Gank is the term we always used in UO days. I'd call it being a douchebag, but that might show my bias.