f13.net

Fuck it right in it's ear. This shit just makes me want to go back to Hellgate London where I don't have to pay a monthy fee for a shitty single player game.

If some random jackass NPC wants me to collect 10 rat tails for him, I'm going to punch a dev right in the face.  :why_so_serious:

This rant was brought to you by the Lord of the Rings Online free trial.

Glad someone other than me said it. It amazes me how almost no major MMO dev puts any effort whatsoever into designing features that let their players actually play together. You'd think that would be pretty standard in this genre.

Fun, long-lasting, cooperative content is hard to produce. It's not just MMO devs, co-op isn't any more than a tiny fraction of the video game world. Some of the best video gaming (in my experience) is a bunch of friends gathered around a screen while one person holds the controller and the rest act as advisors and peanut gallery. When everybody gets a controller, there tends to be a lot of needless death, wasting resources, dragging the people who can't play behind you...

...and these are YOUR FRIENDS. This isn't some random hooligan you just met who'll probably steal from you, get you killed, and run off. These are people who may have known you for years and have to be nice to you because they want to be invited over for beers again. Also when you decide to play a game, you can sit down and play. You don't wait around for 45 minutes while a few people get prepared, and then one of them bails out so you have to find another, and during that wait someone else leaves.

Games have been designed with an entry bar set low enough that anyone can drop in, throw down, and contribute. Then the exit bar is low enough that anybody can leave whenever they like without major consequence. A persistant MMO has not produced either of these, much less both.

The crappy single player game keeps a lot of people interested enough to keep them  p(L)aying.

I know I'm sort of a broken record in these conversations, but, uh, have you played City of Heroes?

e: specifically with regards to your third paragraph.

I think EQ2 and ChampO have both had some kind of "everyone is relevant" code. EQ2 could only take you down to somebody else's level, and I know ChampO was BILLED as letting you play with anyone at any level.

Not to take away from what CoH has done. They were the first to let you roll a newb and help your buddy who's raiding other planes, and it's gotten even easier now.

Solo questing has always been my least favorite method of "grinding."

At least in WoW you can get a good chunk of xp helping in instances even if you don't have the quest. Doesn't do you much good anymore, but I remember doing SM, ZF etc. again and again. Beat questing. In LOTRO, in an instance, you got the quest xp and that was pretty much it. The kill xp was minimal. I found it an endless drudgery of quests.

For me, I'll take instances, even AO/COX generated missions as my preferred way of "grinding." But I'd prefer more than one option. The run from 70 to 80 in WoW was woderful because you could do a few quests, do an instance, get a few more quests. It broke it up.

I don't mind quests. I just think there are too many filler and generic quests in most MMO's today. How about less quests, but longer, more intricate ones instead? Like, actual storylines and stuff, rather than 1500 "kill 10 pigs over yonder and you get a fancy new leather betl!" types.

I don't mind quests either.  As a solo player, it's far more enjoyable to do quests than to randomly kill static mobs as I did in DAoC or EQ. 

What I do hate is a) doing a LONG quest chain only to be rewarded with a few silver or b) doing two quests in the EXACT SAME AREA that produce identical rewards. 

I'd really enjoy a system more like I saw in AO, AC, or DAoC.  Enter a solo instance, kill a boss mob, get cash/item. 

Just so long as you realize that what you are asking for is completely directionless grinding of mobs just standing around.  And, HG:L had quest driven content so I have no clue what that's doing in there.

Eh, the real problem is gameplay. Quests are awesome if the game has honestly good gameplay like Red Faction: Guerrilla. If it's the standard mmo fare of "press 1-2-3", of course it's going to suck.

I put forth that LOTRO has content just like what you guys describe. In fact, they are adding even more of it, mega dynamic random group type as well. It, also has most likely one of the longest quest chains in any MMO history, that is, for the most part, not standard fare and ripe with good writing.

I do believe its the filler content that Ratman_tf takes issue with. However, its is funny the comments come from someone with 1840 hours in WoW, and 8 of those are this week. Just pointing that out. (Not saying wow is a bad game or any of that crap, just that.... perhaps you are burned out by 1800+ hours of kill 10 rats from that title)

EDIT: Ironwood, They (LOTRO Dev)  have been rectifying that issue.

My particular problem with this type of questing is when it just doesn't make sense.

When I wander over to 'Big Bad Scaries Group #1' and kill 10 of them, plus the leader who, let's face it, was hanging around anyway, I don't want to go back to the quest giver and be told 'aha, now you've got the small guys, I want you to go back and kill the leader'.

Because I JUST DID.  His head is even now adorning my shield.  

Fucking Clownshoes.

I'd much rather the quest guy said 'Now, I wanted you to kill the leader, but I see you just did so here's your quest XP and your Fucking Reward, now fuck off out of here you wee shite.'

Anything else is just silly.

These tend to run into problems because making sure everyone is at the same stage, or doesn't miss a quest trigger or item, quickly becomes painful. I'm pretty sure WoW intentionally limits the length of a given quest chain these days.

I'd be perfectly happy if WoW included another level of content. Outdoor normal mobs for soloing, clumped elite mobs for duo'ing or grinding and five person instances for teaming. I'm pretty sure that was their design but they've backed off it now (outdoor elites are now generally rare named). Probably because soloists got frustrated at there being quests they couldn't complete solo, while the "sit in one spot and chain-pull for 10 hours" was just too efficient. Quests are after all quite a good way to both guide and lengthen the levelling process.

Then again, I liked their original design of fatigue reducing your XP gain if you grind too much (neither affects nor affected by quest XP). I think EQ gave me my fill of sitting in one spot killing several hundred mobs with 1-2 models.

I'm asking for more sandbox content like UO, SWG and Eve. Had/have.


It's being an offline MMOG. And the fact that I can even type that contradiction may tell you what I'm talkin' 'bout.

 :drill:

Well, I don't kill 10 rats, I mostly raid with a bit of killing 10 rats for dailies in between raids.
And I hated 70-80. Fucking frozen rat tails. Great... Wonderful expansion Blizz...

What I'm saying is that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of gated/scripted content. Quests were fun and rad and awesome when EQ and DAOC were still big dogs, and that gave us a break from camping crabs.

Just... gah. Welcome to the fantastical world of Middle Earth, collect 10 rat tails. ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...

These old school ideas seem largely predicated on the D&D method: you show up to an MMO with your dedicated group of six and live the game from start to finish together.

Bull. Yes, people play like that. No, the game doesn't need to be designed for that.

Ironwood nails this. And it's something friggin' EQ1 had: you could make progress on a quest before taking the quest, thus having a leg up on the quest once/if you take it. Aion does this to some degree, not strictly hiding drops behind quest triggers, but it's rare.

I would prefer a more fluid experience. If I'm wearing a clan leader's ear, I should be KOS to that clan. If I just went on a tear through a wolf pack, then I shouldn't be told to cut my stripes on killing 10 wolves. Yes, this means being able to theoretically be on all quests at all times. And it means some players are likely just to grind. But that's fine. This genre doesn't need to be canned-content-WoWGWEQ1 on one end and open-world/sim-Eve on the other. FE is sounding like it's a good middle ground, for example.

Heh. Should Nunzio show up and make you an offer you can't refuse? What's wrong with leaving a game whenever you like?

Wait, did you just make a rant post about kill quests and you're a raider?

Retard_tf

Oh, believe me, I understand your basic argument.  I have said it before to myself in that, or other games...  But, you have an awful lot of time int he game that, by all accounts, is the KING of kill 10 rats. I believe you are accustomed to the "end game" where, for all intents, questing is all dried up for you, and maybe has been for a while. I tend to avoid the quests like that in LOTRO, or only do it, if i know i will accidentally get the things I need, while on the way to a more interesting quest

Good news is, Skirmishes in LOTRO are random, scaling, repeatable instanced content starting at 30.

For the record, I agree with you though.

Piss off, mate. I used to hate raiding, but then I actually *gasp* tried it, and at least raiding is playing with other people. Which is more than I can say for questgrinding. Like I said, if I wanted to grind quests, I'd fire up Hellgate London for a local session. If anyone likes, they can subsitute their favorite weeaboo Final Fantasy console game or Diabo 2 for HGL in that example.

There's big difference between solo questing in a MMO and these offline examples, though -- in the MMO there's tons of other people also running around and doing their quests. And personally, i enjoy this background traffic and random encounters and/or chats. It's like a difference between doing your shopping in a local mall before and after the zombie apocalypse swept through it.

Or fire up WoW and make a new character?  LOTRO was released post WoW, it copies the WoW quest grind (maybe not as well) but the point stands, maybe you would find WoW quest grinding almost as annoying, if had played LOTRO for a couple of years first.  Not that I don't agree that quest grinding is boring, but it's still better than non-quest grinding.

Sure it goes through phases. I have a ton of WoW alts, until I started to taper off and got 'serious' with my guild. And I used to solo or duo the heck out of 'old' MMOGs like AO. I don't consider SWG to be solo because of the robust economy it had, though I rarely grouped up to kill mobs in SWG. It was more wheeling and dealing over mail and vendors.  :grin:

So anywho. Yeah, I'm an old, grizzled MMOG fart who's had his fill of questgrinding. Somebody make the next SWG or Eve, eh? Stat!  :awesome_for_real:

Reminds me of a post someone made on the WoW general forums while Burning Crusade was still the latest expansion, and Wrath of the Lich King had just been announced.

The name of the thread was "Welcome to Northrend Hero!"
and when you clicked on the thread it said:

Please kill 10 Howling Fjord bears.

....

Nailed it.

I don't think a game with only long, intricate quest chains would work. Some people like 'em. Shit, I love them. But others want a quick fix they can finish over lunch. They want to be able to walk away for a week and not have forgotten what they were doing when they get back. Even those who like the longer arcs sometimes just like the mac & cheese comfort of kill ten rats.

LotRO actually strikes a better balance than most, with the divide between Epics and K10Rs. Unfortunately, the Epic arcs nearly always end with quests that require a group to complete  Good luck finding PUG for a level 15 Epic when everyone and their Galadhrim Horse is standing at the bank of the Anduin, looking east and pawing the ground.

Epics sound like what you want with grouping content. As a counter-example I hate PUGs, so I've only managed to finish two or three Epic books in the year and a half I've played. I don't live off K10Rs, but I enjoy my Shire pub crawls and Lothlorien tree serenades.


I hear Fallen Earth resolves this by having all leaders drop a head if you haven't completed their kill quest. If you get the kill quest later, you can turn it in. For this change alone, the FE devs deserve a box sale (if only I could find a damn box).

What really fucking pisses me off about this type of quest is when you are asked to bring back body parts from the shit you are killing and the mobs don't drop as many as they should have.  The biggest culprit here is spiders, every fucking game has at least one "bring me some spider legs" quest and every fucking game has spiders dropping ONE leg.  Fuck you, spiders have 8 fucking legs, i don't care if you multiply the requirements by 8 but every fucking spider i kill needs to have 8 legs.  And every bear better have two fucking eyes.

Even that is a trade off though, in terms of bag space. At one point I had about 10 heads, tails ETC...

It is better, but I really do think quest items should have its own bags from now on and forever.


What if they dropped 1 leg, and 7 broken legs?  :why_so_serious:

Funny, I remember EQ did that, you got that damn ogre head in the dwarf starter zone and had to carry it around forever before you were able finish the quest.  Of course like all the early EQ quests you really had to hunt to find the actual quest and there wasn't any easily accessible information to tell you what the quest was.  As I recall the only info you got when the head dropped was that it was marked as unsellable.

Personally long quest chains piss me off, after about 5 steps I just get to the point where I want the damn things to end mostly because I'm an episodic player, I like to log in and spend an hour or so doing something and log out.

Yeah, EQ did that too. And AC for that matter! Everything old is new again!


I'm up to 15 in LOTRO now, and I haven't seen anything like that since the tutorial. The tutorial was great. It felt like Lord of the Rings, with hobbits captured by bandits who wanted to sell them to Sauron. Then after that, it was Kill 10 Rats.

Or do we have to grind through the Kill10Rats in order to get to the cool stuff?

There have been attempts, successful or not to improve on the quest based advancement.  

WAR had PQs and auto tracking of certain kills.  WAR unfortunately had possibly the worst PVE I've seen (bad AI, boring, poorly balanced) and still managed to include the standard kill/collect/deliver quests.  PQs didn't scale well enough for the eventual population ebbs and flows.

AO had missions.  Missions got stale and the rest of the leveling was your standard group based farm (or exploiting).  I quit at the game killing patch (11.6 was it?) so I don't know if it got better.

AOC had some nice solo instances included with it's standard array of quests.  The Lovecraftian house in Khopesh, the sewers, and the pyramid were all pretty cool to run.  They gave you great experience both in the sense of advancement and in crafting a module of content for you to complete.

I like the idea of LOTRO books, it just breaks down for me when it transitions from a solo experience to a group experience.  I'd rather not have my personal plot advancement hindered by the ability to find someone on the exact same step of a quest chain as I am.  I've heard this is better not but not completely remedied or able to be done at appropriate levels.

Personally, I prefer the quest grind to the mob grind. The pure EQ era sit and pull mob grind is an absolute non-starter for me.  If you're going for a quest grind and there are massive content gaps, that could kill your game for me also.  I liked Northrend because there were a lot of quest areas that were either themed (hello cool Howling Fjord pirate area) or tied to a bit a lore/story/plot progression.  

A great open world sandbox can do away with all of this, but without a plot or point, I'll likely get bored. Diablo style grinding/advancement would also be great thing to see, where you're purely driving towards the completion of plot points, but I'm not sure how this can successfully be incoporated into a MMO framework.  Isn't this what Old Republic is aiming for?

Same.  I hate quests.  I prefer to simply kill random mobs for xp and loot, ideally in a difficult area where pulling is tough and the group gets a sense of danger.  That's only for a vanilla diku game though, an already pretty bad option.

DDO is one of the only MMOs that doesn't really have the "kill x of y" and "fedex" quests. Though it is group-focused, it's more soloable than it used to be, as well. Unfortunately, each quest/dungeon is SO self-contained, the entire game feels strongly like "rides within a theme-park". You ask your group mates if everyone is one the quest (i.e. "does everyone have a ticket to get on the ride, or at least get a reward at the end of the ride"). Outside of the rides, there is not much else to do. But the rides, at least for the most part, are good. And there are a few hellish rides, like "The Pit" (a notorious multi-level death-trap dungeon)...
Also, DDO does not claim to have the "dynamic living world where everything you do makes a difference!" BS. It just gives you ton of adventures (rides) packed in a small area. I wish other MMOs would find ways to bring something similar and ditch the ad-nauseum quest grinds.

But that doesn't exist anymore.  Quest grind is exactly the same as mob grind but with a bunch of running back and forth thrown in, the only difference is with straight mob grinding you spend your time fighting rather than running places.

In AC we did that because at ship our NPCs were too bone-stick-stone stupid to do more than react to what you gave them. And for a long time, if you have them something they didn't recognize, they'd eat it.


At 15, you should be nearly to Othrongroth -- the conclusion of Epic Book I, set in the Barrow Downs. It's the only Book I've finished with a group, and it's pretty memorable.

Not always, but Fallen Earth has a lot of this.  You kill a dude and get his quest drop whether you're on it or not.

There's no flavor to that.  I know what I'm essentially doing, but instead of just grinding out mobs; I'm moving around, getting some lore/story in, exploring, and getting rewards on top of whatever I got for killing.  If combat were that interesting in these games, I might not mind grinding, but there's other issues mob grinding introduces.  I haven't seen them addressed, because I really haven't seen that mode of leveling encouraged in games I'm interested in.  Of course, I do enough research that I'll likely avoid that in any case, so I'll likely not see the improvements.  :awesome_for_real:

Wandering around just killing shit to grind levels isn't much of an attraction for me either.  I crave direction and purpose.

I grew up on mob grind. Never had a problem slaughtering monsters just had a problem doing so for 8 hours straight for half an xp bar. My issue is really the grind not whether i'm quest grinding or mob grinding. I would love for quest to be like..quest but that's asking too much. To me quest are what most people call raids...

(http://i194.photobucket.com/albums/z248/batim_2007/Motovation/fdaa4099eed530_full.jpg)

It honestly sounds to me that the problem _tf has is that he wants a virtual world, not a online theme park. I can understand that feeling. Although I would take the WoW/LotRO quest grind over the Aion mob grind any day.

(http://lotroimages.akamai.lotro.com/media/motivational/StarbuckjonesEpicStoryposter.jpg)

I second the notion that it sounds like DDO is the game you want, at least in a theoretical sense. I'm not personally detecting any desire for virtual worldness here. Just a desire for group-focused content, and that's basically all you get from DDO.

Hmm. My champ is level 20 and I'm not there. I do a lot of side-quests and dick around with crafting and hanging out at the AH playing crappy midi songs (at least they're period-appropriate, if I hear Stairway to Heaven again...).

He lost a keyboard, but he found a friendly image search. :grin:

Woohoo, a general rant thread!

I want SWG with good combat. It had everything. It's just that none of it worked.

:cry:

About 15 minutes into my trial of SWG it told me to kill 90 rats. Well I suppose technically it was skin 90 rats.

Which version?

My SWG trial involved two or three quests from a dispenser that told me to run across half of randomly (and badly) generated planet landscape to slay a few rats spawned over there for me. Or deliver a package.

So half way through that second or third run i said fuck it and spent rest of the trial crafting rifles and shopping for clothes with the money i made. Sadly, very little of these looked any good, too.

Years ago at this point. Pre-NGE. I was doing some sort of intro tutorial thing - I was a wookie something-or-other, the 90 rats was actually the 3rd thing I had to do, I forget what the first thing was, second thing was skin 10 rats or something. Some guy came up to me and tried to get me to group with him to do something I didn't really get so I pretended I could only speak Wookie so he'd go away.  :oh_i_see:

But yeah it was basically "Here, let's teach you how to do the basics of your crafting shit, kill 10 rats, skin them, and make a tent." And I thought OK I can do that. After I did it, it basically said "Great! Now that you know how to do that, kill 90 rats, skin them, and ..."  :awesome_for_real:

That describes Anarchy Online.

Oh god yeah, I remember that. I was like, "WTF?" I was doing the crafting equivalent, which meant I was going to Craft90Modules anyway, but if it was a kill quest, I would have dropped it in an instant.

Who started that whole thing, quest loot only drops when you're on the quest, was it WoW?

Some technical director somewhere, I am sure. I think its more of a technology issue really, than a game play one.

If quest loot shares the same bag space with regular loot, then it is far preferable for it to only drop when you're on the quest.

Then it shouldn't!

WoW was the first one I saw that did it.

I thought it was just a way to prevent people from farming quest loot and selling to people.  In EQ I'd just go buy a bunch of the shit I needed to turn in and spam the quest giver with it to gain levels instantly.

CoH was the first I remember. EQ2 then ran with it. WoW too of course but no idea who copied who during beta on this feature.

Ummm... CoH didn't have loot at the time, quest or otherwise.

Have you tried Fallen Earth?  That's about how I describe it to people.  SWG with much less suck.

I do too, but I hate being given orders by NPC bots. If I were to put it into words, I'd say that I'd like more organically generated content. From quest items that drop from mobs, giving me the illusion that I found the quest, as opposed to being handed it by an NPC; to personally generated goals. Most of those come from tradeskills. Gathering and crafting items. Now, I know anything can become a grind when you're trying to do a lot of activity X to get to point Y, but a little lateral thinking in how to deliver content can go a long way with me.

Gah. My feeling is that if they had decent PvE and PvP content, to go along with the very robust tradeskill/harvesting system, then SWG would have been damn near perfect. And I'm not talking "If I had a million dollars, I'd be a millionaire!", I'm talking "Raph doesn't seem to enjoy Diablos as much as MUSHes."

A few years back when I was really into NWN modding I tried my hand at making my ideal quest/explorer mechanics in a short 20ish minute module. One of the gimmicks was to make useless skills useful through background skill checks. So for instance if a player walked by a pile of bones it would just be a set piece, but if a player had points in Lore+Spot the bones would be lootable and you'd get XP for passing the check. Same sort of skill checks would also change what mobs spawned, if a door was static or usable, difficulty/length of a quest, and provide short term combat buffs like passing a concentration check during an ambush would cast time stop for you. When it was done I think there was something like 100+ of these put in and about 20 more that changed things based on what class you were.

Putting that in an mmo however would probably be unrealistic.

Just in my own opinion I think what developers on MMO's miss out on the most is designing things that give the player the impression that they are actually interacting with the world. Killing 10 rats isn't engaging at all. Showing up to kill 10 rats, having a small cave entrance spawn (just for you/party), and the quest changing to "fuck the rats, explore the spooky cave full of loot and spooks" is.

In most games there really isn't a difference between a quest and old-school camping other than a new car smell that has now faded. Personally I'd rather kill what I want with who I want then get railroaded into killing exactly what the game wants me to kill to get reasonable xp. It would be one thing if quests were actually interesting and questy but "kill ten rats and bring me their tails" to me isn't any different from just killing ten rats on my own.

The same can be said of many open world games with templated repetitive missions.

Or they could have said "fuck the tradeskills and harvesting system that 3 people care about, lets make a STARWARS Game." I recon if the spent the same talent and resources doing that instead SWG would be perfect.

Problem I can see with that is that in a MMO it would mean that players would just cluster around the nearest/easiest mobs. With quests sending you to kill specific things you can spread players around a bit, distribute them, get all of your content seen & used, etc.

Thing with quest-driven content/grind is that the more polished it all is, the more variety there is and the less painful crap there is to do (low droprate item collection quests for instance. Fuck those, really) the less it feels like grind.

Yeah an entirely new paradigm for character advancement would be great, but I've yet to see anyone come up with a convincing one.

Because everyone agrees on what a great Star Wars game should be about.

(http://www.cdaccess.com/jpg/shared/front/large/swjarjar.jpg)

Yep. However, it was the first diku-inspired MMO I can think of where you went on a quest to get X and when it dropped (not to your inventory, but to your Mission progress), it would also for everyone else.

Which of course is why I threw EQ2 in there, to be closer to the spirit of the original question :-)


Yea, played beta for a while. I love what it's trying to do, but I am tired of paying for "trying to do". That plus the game graphics felt like an indie version of Fallout 3, which I was playing a lot of again at the time (so it biased me). SWG is my high water mark for this style of game, and that was fun more because of how it was broken than anything else.

I have to say.  This.  A thousand times this!  What kind of stupidity got into developers in the years after EverQuest that they ever thought it was ok to require you to have accepted a quest in order to get the drops I have no idea, but killing something and having it's head/ear/left testicle drop so that you could hand it to the guy that wanted the person dead is such a simple no-brainer that it makes me incredulous that people switched to the insane WoW method of doing things where quest items do not drop unless you're on the quest.  The incredibly stupid part is that with Serpent's Spine, even EQ started to do this (which I should note contributed GREATLY to my leaving the game, their stupid adding in a wow-like quest system where you had to accept the quests before progressing on them).

Everyone should essentially be on all quests at the same time and be able to make progress.  All this shit is tracked in the background anyway it seems, so it's not like it would cause technical issues to have your quest progress be tracked without informing you (since you haven't actually learned of the quest) but when you do finally talk to the right NPC he instantly recognizes that you have succeeded and rewards you.  Now there might be some quests where it's reasonable for you to have accepted the quest, from a logical standpoint, since you wouldn't perform the correct action on your own.  Yes, sure, in EQ it made little sense to pick up a random head drop and then look for whoever wants it, cause you wouldn't have taken the head if you didn't know someone wanted it.  But in the end the tiny bit of 'yeah it makes sense that I wouldn't have known to take his left testicle' is trumped by the fact that I am now killing the same guy twice and had to go out to do it a second time even though I already did it.

And another thing that I'll note in Aion in particular, but appears in other games in small amounts...quests that are repeatable that involve killing X amount of monster Y need to be infinite instead.  Lineage II got this one right (Sort of.  The reward system for those quests was very screwed up there.) by having infinite-collect quests where you would be sent out to kill monster Y and collect item X off them.  When you got back in, you turned in your stack of item X which could be as small as 5 and as big as however many monsters you killed, and you'd get a reward based on the number you turned in.  Simple.  Easy.  No running back to the questgiver every five minutes.  And it actually makes sense as a bounty-type quest because that's exactly what you'd get if there was a bounty on a particular type of hazardous wildlife/monster.  Bring me <unique monster part> from each one you kill and I'll reward you based on how many you brought.
And this.  This is why I was saying in the Aion thread that I'm tired of all these stupid quests and the game would be improved by removing the vast majority of them.  Quests are thinly disguised grind in any game, except for the few that are cool and have great story/plot/whatever.  Removing all the kill 10 rats nonsense and keeping only the quests that are significant would be an improvement (even if it means you don't always have a quest to do and sometimes have to go out and grind).  If all the quest you can give me is go kill 10 X, then don't give me any quest at all and just bump up the exp of X, and bump up the exp of Y, Z, and F while you're at it so I can go kill whichever one of those I feel like killing today and get the same advancement rate.

I think everyone (at least here) realizes that the quests mechanics are designed nowadays to maximize content stretching.

They want
- more to do in less content space
- reduce the deviation min/max (so grossly smart people won't get a gross advantage)
- force inventory management as its own activity
- somewhat manage known quest items separately from inventory

In particular they don't want you able to make one pass through content, gathering all the items you know ahead of time you will need, and avoid the back-and-forth stall they have planned for you. It s the same reason a goddamn road that should be the length of a driveway takes 5 minutes to run down.

Pretty sure way back in DAoC you would only get quest drops if you were on the quest. They'd also drop every time.

Lets go one step further.

If you're going to provide repeatable milestones for killing monsters just have a counter of "uncollected kills". When you kill something, it goes up, when you turn something in, it goes down. Seriously, fuck K10R quests. Might as well just make rats give more XP and drop leather belts.

On second thought, lets just end the idea of inventory management in MMO's. Bags, slots, weight, etc. Fuck all that shit, that is for single player games where it serves as a limiter, not for games where it serves as a hindrance as you go get your 10th mule character. MMORPG's are for killing things with friends, and every time i hear "I need a break because my inventory is full and i need to go transfer/sell/whatever" i want to punch a developer in the face.

Wut?  This has been the constant, weary (and wearying) refrain for the best part of a decade. If you're glad he said, you'll be delighted that it's at least the second thread on this this month on this very board.  God knows how often over the last few years.

tl;dr this thread topic is as tired as killing ten rats.

Pretty much.  It may have cost me 16k gold, but I am happy I bought the mammoth mount in WoW (even though I am currently not playing).  Now if I am out and need to sell/repair or anyone I am playing with does, I just mount up and have a vendor sitting with me.   Totally worth the cash in terms of enjoying the game.  Now if we could just get this sort of thing without it being a huge gold/time sink in the first place, we'd have a nice mechanic. 

For some reason running from the wilderness back to town is a core mechanic in RPGs  these days and I'm not sure why.  I think single player RPGs are actually more forgiving than MMOs these days, even though you say it is more ok for SP RPGs to do it.  Usually in most single player RPGs I've got a huge inventory compared to MMOs.

Part of this may be related to the fact that in most MMOs I'm carting a lot of shit around with me.  On my druid in WoW for instance, I am carrying at any given time 3 sets of gear + rarely used but worth keeping on me trinkets and idols, potions, reagents, flasks, etc.  My bank is already filled to the brim, so I can't really store more stuff in there and head back and forth when I need stuff even if I wanted to.  So, I'm lucky at any given time to have more than 20 free slots, which makes things even worse.

In fact, one of the things i liked about Champions Online (until recently), was that I almost never ran out of inventory space because items didn't drop that frequently.  Then they did their economy patch where things drop vendor trash all the time, and now I fill up frequently, which is even more of a pain since there aren't vendors conveniently located at every hub.

I think this all really DOES have to do with the quest based content stuff because everything is built with the idea that you won't be out  "in the field" for very long at any given time.  If you do want to stay out for a while though, you'll eventually have to come back to sell off your stuff, or else just leave plenty of crap on the ground, which defeats 1/2 the purpose.  Anyway, I'm done ranting about this for now...

WOW likes making people go back to places to "force" people coming together. Whether it's vendors or the AH.  I think it's pretty dumb.

If you would like to see a game where this need was negated. Try SWG. and look at the NPC towns.

No thanks.

Hay, just saying :)

At launch and after cities were very different; however, major gathering spots never really went away. At least during my few stints. The point of doing so is the same as WoW (and LoTRO, and EQ2 and Aion, etc): in the absence of a requiring a return home periodically, the only people that would are those in commerce. If you let everyone have bottomless inventories and remote access to the AH from wherever they are, the games would feel like single player experiences with a chat channel.

Which people already complain about :-)

Or DAOC after housing - as convenient as the player houses and stores were, they pretty much killed the social hubs that had sprung up around crafting areas.

I don't mind making people come together for commerce between players (AH, mail access), but making me come back to dump a bunch of vendor trash isn't too exciting.  In fact, I wouldn't mind dumping the idea of vendor trash all together and just having things drop increased cash, but I guess thats a slightly different topic.

But how else will I get [A Gnome Effigy] (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29570) ?  :(

I'm highly amused that it takes a casual kid's game to solve the problem.  Free Realms has no inventory limits.  It's awesome.

That might work in a kids game, but you have to consider that in a game like WoW, were this to be implemented, the servers would instantaneously combust as every OCD catass in the game starts hoarding fifty million rat tails or some shit.

I have no idea why but this made me laugh... pretty god damn hard too...

At least that was my experience. Probably more of an issue with their particular interface than with the fact that inventory was unlimited.

I only go into inventory on the class equip screens.  Since it filters out everything that isn't usable the list gets a lot better.

I know they've added some other filters for things like collections, but I rarely go into those screens to notice updates.  It still gives me the option of keeping everything, and it's nothing an improved filter couldn't handle.  I'll take it over the alternative.

I recall it being much more drastic, and only one hub survived, and that's because it was in the center of the galaxy. All other NPC towns, were dead. Dead dead. I was the mayor of two cities, each had 3-5 guilds in them, with well over 200 or more citizens.

My job was to make NPC city's obsolete.

Why the never used the NPC cites as housing first, is beyond me. They even had models, and elevators, and apartments all laid out, and never used.

I think they had an aversion to instancing, which is why they never opened apartments. 

Scatter the world with mobs. Let me explore and find them on my own. Don't hold my hand and force me down a railroad in order to advance at a reasonable pace. I loved UO- as my character got better, I was able to fight tougher and tougher things, which in turn dropped better stuff. Add in the occasional random phat lewt drop (nothing more exciting than have a purple item drop from some random trash mob that I only killed because it attacked me on the way back to turn in quests)  and some decent crafting stuff and call it a day. A few epic-style quests are fine, but when groupmates complain about killing monsters because they don't have the quest for them I want to go on a killing spree.

It's common to complain about quests (e.g. bad writing, weird difficulty curve, etc.), less common to complain about questing systems, which in my opinion are fundamentally broken because they actively discourage grouping. People who enjoy soloing, which seems to be most people, don't have a problem with this.

My problem isn't with killing 10 rats,* it's with not having any common goals with 99.9% of the people I'm supposed to be playing with.

*although the time I first set foot on the vast, untamed wilderness of danger and adventure that is Northrend and was immediately tasked with collecting dog food was a bit much even for me.

So true.  Which contributes to why group instances are popular.  They put everyone on the same goal.

I'll never play another game where I'm forced to group to level, unless the game makes it clear from the get-go that that is the entire point of it like DDO, and I have a set group of friends who I can rely on to want to do all that stuff together in at least a semi-organized way, etc.

DAOC-like 'lets all grind this camp for hours' systems are gone for a reason. Because they sucked. Questing systems, when done right (WoW and the revamped LotRO stuff I would describe as done right) keep you moving around, change what you're doing, give you a bit of story with your leveling, etc., and you can work at your own pace.

Really no point in having in-city apartments when player housing was there right away too. Sorta need to pick a lane there. I'd have preferred they had a two year plan and stuck with it:

1. Launch with apartments.
2. Release player housing at four months
3. Release player cities at one year.
4. Release space flight at two years.

This way all the player congregation forms into social groups, based on origination. Then these groups start to naturally go from inhabitants to immigrants in sub-groups to settlers to explorers to colonizers. Unfortunately, you can't stick to a plan when you're burning up in the daily fires.

Only a few places survived Player Cities, but by then it didn't matter because there wasn't a whole slew of new players arriving that needed to be trained up anyway.

I'm trying to remember the first game that required the player to go back to town to sell things they didn't want. Bard's Tale? Wizardry? The early Ultimas had unlimited inventory, but added limits later because it was more realistic. Resource management is fun to a degree.

What isn't fun is Vendor Trash, which I think was invented with EQ. I think the idea there was a rat wouldn't carry money, but someone somewhere might need a rat tail and would buy it off you. That seems to have snowballed a bit.

Allow me to summarize this thread:

"I hate the old stuff, it was horrible.  The new stuff solved all the problems, but I still hate it." *logs in*

"Forced grouping is horrible.  Also stupid is a game that lets you play solo."

It's much simpler than that:

Be careful what you wish for.

Boy do I feel smug. My tastes seem to coincide with the average consumer, or dev. I don't hate quest generated content if it's done reasonably well (WoW, EQ2, LotR, AoC, fuck, even some of WaR). It's when it's done shitty (Aion), that I hate it. I'm not looking for a complete overhaul of the MMO anymore, just something that can make a fascimile of WoW down to the right details.

Just to further agitate, I also rather like the holy trinity. It suits the group I play MMOs with rather well.

That's it, really. I hate the design pendulum swinging from campgrinding over to questgrinding, and most big name games following suit because they have the imagination of a brick.

Eamon? Telenguard (Rogue)? I seem to remember going back to town to sell in the olde school games from the Apple II era.

Between constant repetitive kill 10 rat quests and camping mobs, at this point I want the camping mobs back.  No game has had me sit in one place and camp while also managing to set up a very smooth, relaxing rhythm for several hours since EQ, though.  It's not just camping a spot, which you can do in almost any game, particularly Aion, but something about the whole getting into a relaxing groove, that EQ managed to put me into but Aion and other games don't.

Of course, I'm one of the ones that never hated the old stuff in the first place and I've never liked the whole quest-driven content thing at all.  Never really asked for anything other than EQ before it started trying to copy WoW.  I occasionally consider getting a mac for the express purpose of playing on the EQ Mac server, that's time-locked in the Planes of Power era (unless they finally shut it down at some point).

I agree with this totally, but I'm not keen on the "all quests at all times" model either.

From an RP perspective, you might have just killed 700 wolves, but did you know to collect their tails? No? Then STFU bitch and go out and get me 10 tails.
From a mechanical perspective, fuck the old EQ1 style of "shit that rat dropped a testicle. gimme a sec I have to alt-tab to allakhazam to see if it's for anything before I sell it. Ah it's for a quest, better keep it and have it clog my inventory for the next 3 hours/days/months."

I do like the LOTRO mechanic of quest items going into a "quest item inventory" and so not clogging your bags.
I don't like the overly-long wordiness of the questgivers in LOTRO.

I mean, I'm all for story and context and background. I read the quest descriptions in WoW so I know why I'm collecting the frozen rat tails. LORTO, though is just way to fucking wordy with that kind of shit. I don't need a huge 20-line block of text to accompany my K10R quests. So now I skip pretty much ALL of LOTRO's quest text, and I've played less than 10 sessions still.

Nothing forces you to do every single quest, and nothing but them, in any game.   In the Aion beta I ground out kills for 20 mins or so because I didn't want to run back to town only to run to where I was again.  I did so in FE and LOTR as well.  WoW's the only one I haven't done it in when leveling, but that's because I want to know all the little lore details of each quest.  I could have done it if I wanted to.  I fail to see the problem.

As for EQ's pacing; you're right, Koy, no other game has done it and there's a reason for that.  EQ mobs took a minute or more to kill per mob.  That gave the puller plenty of time to run out, grab one from the pack and run back just as it was dying (or to kite it for a moment) so the tank could move on to the next.   I don't think the modern playerbase of MMOs would put up with that kind of time frame, and nobody seems interested in developing niche games.  They're certainly not willing to risk a few million trying it out 'just to see.'

Never really thought of it that way before, but yeah.  I think that's exactly what made the pace so smoothly relaxing that I was happy camping a spot for hours in EQ, but I get annoyed, bored, and antsy to move on, in other games.  That is exactly what I miss about pulling in EQ.  It's frantic trying to keep a mob in camp at all times in other games - not to mention the annoying leashing mechanics make pulling to a camp really irritatingly difficult in most games now.

When you're alternative to quest grinding is mob grinding, that's not really a choice. It's still a game play mechanic unique to this genre. Well, unique in that it usually involves exactly the same action over and over.

There's certainly grinding in other games and genres. Heck, leveling up in CoD# is grindy. However, the wrapper around that feels very different because it's not the same chain of four skills against every single target there is in the game.

I don't hate quest grinds. I'd rather that than mob grinds any day of the week because at least the quest grinds are intended to move you through the content at a measured pace. CoH started along this path and almost every diku since has used it. I'd much rather ride the rails the designers intended than to find a hill and camp it hoping nobody else shows up to poach my hunt. Because that is the type of old school best left to history.

What I personally can't do anymore is PvE grinds for a PvP game. No diku yet has had as compelling a PvP system as a FPS match, and with more persistent elements coming to the latter, I'm willing to accept MMO PvP just isn't going to be for me. So if I take that and then add 15 hours of PvE grind before it, yea, not worth my time.

tl;dr: If a PvP MMO doesn't have PvP right away, it's not a PvP MMO.

But you can have the worst of both worlds! I loved  :uhrr: getting a mission in CO where all the target mobs were camped by players.

This is what I was trying to say a lot clumsier, both in this thread, and the Aion one.

Yes. Hence I do not own it. HATED this in beta. I appreciate persistence, and can actually stomach camping to a degree. But your game between have more than just one or two starting tracks if you're gonna pull public-space stuff like this. Otherwise it's just annoying for everyone who shows up in the first three weeks of launch, and does nothing to compel people to role alts. Even if the second time is less annoying due to there being less people around, you can't help but remember how bad it was the first time.

It's kinda funny there isn't many people complaining about grind in say, Mario. After all it's pretty much using the single skill to jump over the fucking mushrooms all day long. All way to next level castle.

I knew something like this would eventually come up. Video games, or any game really, have repetative actions, we get it. It's the perception of doing things over and over again that determines if things are grindy or not.

For instance say, Aion, where you are killing the same mob over and over, literally thousands of times to gain a level. Grindy. Vs, say, WoW, where the exp gain is back loaded, and yes you are killing those mobs, but then you run back to town (experiencing a piece of terrain other than the same fucking foozle hill in Aion), and turn in the qst to get exp, cash, items etc. Not grindy (to me). That at least feels rewarding.

Most people haven't put 1845 hours into Mario 3 (Most  :awesome_for_real:) whereas MMORPGs are aimed at long term play.

For me, the difference is one of engagement. Tetris is perhaps the most repetitious video game in existence but it works because every single decision is important, both short- and long-term (inasmuch as Tetris has a long term). With MMOs you figure out your optimal rotation pretty quickly, and from there it's very easy to become disconnected from the game even while you're still sitting there pressing buttons. Plus, since character progression is mostly one-dimensional, none of the big-picture decisions you make (questing vs mob grinding, where to level, etc) really matter since in the end it all amounts to just another few bubbles on the xp bar regardless.

What kind of insane OCD'er puts 1845 hours into any game? Shit that's a whole year of full work weeks.

green

Maybe those rat testicles (and all other quest drops) could be "Double-click this to start the quest." Even better, maybe have some kind of library you go to, with sages and crap, and they could tell you where to take it. You'd get two quests in one! It'd also be annoying to most of the players. I'm probably the only one who would think that's fun.


Yeah, PoBS and WAR and CO did that too, and a great many WoW: WotLK quests for that matter. I make it a point to skip every other sentence in quest text, just to see if it makes it better. (It does.)

It's going to take an action-y type MMOG to break the mold.  Whether it's a persistent FPS or some other arcade type game.  It'll have to stop with the sequencing of the same hotkeys through a fight.

Questing and Grinding will be acceptable again because you're playing the game and not the UI.

I disagree.  I think that breaking the mold could also be done by someone artfully combining games like puzzle pirates (fun yet brief minigames), WoW (achievement + atmosphere), and ATiTD (building + societal dynamics).  There are a number of fantastic gaming aspects already available in current subscription games.  They just need to be streamlined and combined in a fashion that doesn't create yet another soul-sucking grind.

Actiony has been done to death in FPS and presents many technical problems in massive worlds.  The key, I believe, is to take the turn-based hybrid approach we see now in MMO's and make them feel more proactive/reactive to the player.  Coupling action-y to a character building, long-term model seems too difficult to balance and maintain.  

FFXI did it... at least that is what i gleaned from my time playing as a ranger in that game and then as a paladin. I have no comparison since I never got into EQ, so take this with a grain of salt. However, in FFXI it was all about the chains and xp bonuses you could get (pre-BURN partying). Chain 5s were the golden goose if your puller could keep up with the pace and always have the next mob waiting. In fact, this is what propelled many to push bards into pulling for the sleep queue'd mobs. FFXI seemed to be broken into parts though - the main quest line part which was never done for anything other than the rank and story, and the xp part which was buzzsaw grinding.

Of course the only real quests I cared about back then were the AF armor quests...which sadly do not exist in other games.

Minigames and achievements can be added to any game to make it more interesting.  Minigames for keeping you occupied when one activity gets boring or tedious and achievements are fun since it gives you a goal to work towards.

Society building can be sprung in any game as long as you have the tools in the game to make it, and don't allow players to go around them.  Although if you're referring to sociatal as the aim of the game, it would be interesting as well.  What kind of mechanics, or game style, who support that on a large scale AND be fun?  Building things is interesting, but how does that scale with people?  What are you doing while building?  Are you physically laying bricks?  Or you commanding minions of workers?  What is the typical game session like as far as what you're actually doing minute by minute.

I think any game style could fit in, you obviously just have to make it work which is the incredibly difficult thing to do.

More user content creation options would be breaking the mold for me. Imagine what people's reaction would have been if it was Blizzard who launched the CoX Mission Architect to let people create their own 5-man dungeons with a simple to use UI and presets (mobs+boss, face off against a horde of mobs, puzzle-oriented dungeon). People would shit their pants.

Any sort of player building would be nice for a change.

Most the time now when I'm playing an MMO I just sit back and wonder what kind of retard designed some of this non-sense. Some of the most innovative ideas I've seen over the years mostly came from modding communities, not development teams.

I tend to agree with you on the modding point. However, for every gem you get, you also have hundreds of absolute shit designs. Dunno if I could suffer through playing/testing new maps and dungeons just trying to find the one that is fun. Christ, just saying that makes the grind alarm go off... ever so faintly.

This has been raised often. And I just did in this thread about CoD4. I've no problem spending dozens of hours playing team deathmatch hardcore mode on a private server playing through the same 20 maps while leveling up for new weapons and abilities. It's because while the game is the same, the play is constantly changing.

That is not something you can get in a static-content MMO. You can get it in PvP, like a Battleground/Scenario setup. I always enjoy those unless I'm cockblocked by some completely contradictory grind to get there.


If I wanted more mods, I'd go play NWN and trade scenarios. There's a market for that, but it's more the D&D online one than the content-consumers who want the polish they're paying $60 to get. 30 years of people wanting customized content, 30 years of people having quite adequate tools to deliver it, and nowadays with entire content delivery services to make it easier than ever, and all I've seen as a result is the very best eventually get hired by Valve or Blizzard where their stuff then goes bigtime.

The problem has never been the tech nor the money. It's about the skill, talent, and persistence to see it through. I'm all about enabling the iteration, but I'm only going to pay for the polished high water marks.

CoH can do that because there's no expectation of bosses dropping specific pieces of loot. Games like NWN can do it because there's really no long term repercussions to an economy or to other players if some dude twinks out his home character. Letting players get their hands into the loot delivery process in a game like WoW, though, just means doom.

To be fair, CoH/V really didn't handle rewards for player created content very well either. They created a new resource (tickets) that served instead of loot and let you trade them for random rolls on loot tables / certain things while also providing XP and in-game currency rewards. Players quickly found the best returns (which is on top of the fact that player-created missions have next-to-zero travel time, meaning they can be completed more quickly than conventional missions.

At the very least CoH/V needed a diminishing returns on rewards obtained from player created missions.

It was more the XP than anything that caused the flood of tickets. If you had the right AT's and knew how to work the level bridges you could powerlevel players extremely fast. This resulted in a mass accumulation of tickets which about every 2-3 hours hit the max you could hold as a byproduct. Even after the comm officer Xp correction (which I never personally did) you could power level a level 1 to 50 in a few days.

I didn't find the rewards to be gamebreaking though. Lot of players were making money, getting the high level toons they always wanted, and for the most part enjoying the game.


Never said user-created dungeons should drop specific pieces of loot made by its creator. I just mentioned the layout/theme should be user created. Blizzard could easily just throw together a big list of randomly generated BoP items with a few specifically itemized pieces of gear tossed in that mobs could drop (Diablo).

Player made dungeons can be set up with templates and restrictions so they're not loot pinatas or heinous deathtraps with no real purpose. (Must have at least one exit, lawl.)

Letting people "Second Life" the average MMOG would be stupid. Letting them play with a dungeon editor can be fine.

The lolz no exit is to be expected and designed out. But if players first instinct is to make infinite xp loops than something is wrong with your xp system not the generated dungeons.

I concur.

www.ryzom.com

If drops were more Diablo-ish and less set loot tables, it'd be easy to let player made dungeons handle loot drops.  Have the game figure out the monster's loot level and it handles it like any other chance for a drop.

The other issue is WoW bosses are all scripted to high heaven. How did CoH handle this for player-created enemies? I guess a boss fight in WoW is a bit of a different animal than an archvillain in CoH anyway.

Mission Architect system (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA8D4-YG0pM) - Video Trailer for AE, covers some of the features.

AE let you pick out a mob type (minion, lt, boss, AV) then pick from an powerpool list. You set a difficulty which determined which powers would be availble from the powerpool. All mobs were required to have at least 1 ranged attack, but I can't remember if they were required to have a melee attack. Also You could add a few conditionals to an objective boss and their prefered fighting style (melee/range). Difficulty ranges were pretty varied depending on mob-type and their powerpools but melee mobs in particular hit ridiculously hard in comparison to standard CoX mobs. Some people made missions that were just meant to be insanely hard since most the mobs were using powerpool combos that rip through most standard characters.

For heavy scripted games like WoW/Eq you would have to use presets that people just choose from when it comes to the boss and just let players flavor it (name, model, dialog). Something like Create Dungeon->Pick Coliseum Theme->Select from Coliseum Boss Battle Presets/Templates if that makes sense.

Is Ryzom any good? I haven't really followed it.

No, but for some reason it won't stay dead. It's the Jean Grey of mmogs.

Oh well. Back to raiding then!  :awesome_for_real:

I have always thought it was excellent for what it is. Interesting skill/ability system (you make your skills), lovely art work, mob migrations, sandbox like game play, and the first MMO editor (http://www.ryzom.com/en/ryzom_ring.html) (Some would say where CoH got the idea, or at least patterned theirs after, but the CoH ones is much more limited) that fits to a "T" what you described as a good mmo editor.

Ryzom was a good idea that suffered first from being generic sci-fi/fantasy hybird then through a series of business models that didn't really stick too well. Iirc,it originated as a technology proof-of-concept from Nevrax to peddle their technology suite, and during that development they thought it became big enough to rival other games for users' time and money.

The bricks system is probably the most unique thing it had at launch: the ability to customize your skills a fair number of ways, from whether it had a dot, how it was ranged, etc. Never got too far with that but it seemed like a good idea on paper.

Then later they finally settled on something like a build-your-own adventure kit thing as MrB mentioned.

99% of CoH/V giant monster / AV fights are tank and spank. A small number have a bit more of a trick to them, but it is much more free form than WoW's boss fights.

In my experience, custom mobs created via the COH mission architect tend to just use their abilities (either copies of player abilities, or sometimes more powerful versions of player abilities) "on cooldown" whenever they're available with some rudimentary melee/ranged power selection AI. This, combined with uneven power scaling, also means that some powersets are absolutely devastating on custom mobs; finding out which ones these are is half the fun when creating a MA arc.  :awesome_for_real:

(anecdote: after testing and review feedback, I ended up changing powersets of almost all custom mobs in my arc at one point, except for 2 minions)

I think in the end an important question is, "Why do people hate to group and prefer to solo in a multiplayer game, often especially if they've played games of this kind before?" That's what drives the questing systems that are following WoW (and diku) templates.

I don't think it's a deep-seated preference for solo play or a generic aversion to grouping, for the most part. It's a collision of three design principles:

1) using time as the basic index for difficulty of gameplay. E.g., the most difficult or challenging tasks with the highest rewards are typically the most time-consuming to complete
2) making the main unit of progression in a persistent gameworld the power or capacity of individual characters
3) making accumulation of environmental objects, e.g., loot, the main differential between characters who have the same amount of time invested and the same progression achieved.

That's a perfect storm in terms of driving most players away from groups or making them hate the need to group.  Time: when the most demanding tasks are time-intensive but also require groups, you have very strong needs to coordinate your schedule with other players and to build trusting connections so that you know that when you commit to a long time investment, others will be equally committed. Those kinds of connections are hard to build and hard to sustain. If there's an alternative (time-intensive tasks which can be completely without exposure to the risk of grouping with other players or the difficulty of building trusted social networks), most players will prefer the alternative even IF a good group experience is more fun.

Individual progression: disincentivizes working a group, because you get nothing from it.

Loot accumulation as source of differential success: makes grouping a major risk.

----------

There's small tweaks that push back on some of this. Make the most group-necessary tasks the least time-intensive and make grouping an automatic mechanic in those areas. Public quests or the way Toontown handles grouping are good examples. Individual progression: emphasize guild progression as a more rewarding mechanic than individual levelling. Shadowbane, Eve, even Warhammer tried for that. Loot accumulation: there are systems which take some of the risk of grouping out a bit.

But really, the only way to make a gameworld more fundamentally social is to make it more sandboxy and player-driven, like Eve. Even there you can retain plenty of OCD-type solo-friendly activities for players to drop into when they're not in the mood for more interactive gameplay, but you can't break away from the paradox of people demanding soloabilty in a multiplayer game until you really look hard at why grouping is so risky and inconvenient in the dominant paradigm.

If time is your metric then solo play should take longer to accomplish the same task as group play.  I'm fine with this.  Sadly, this will never happen because subscription retention is closely tied to the development of social bonding.  The only way to reinforce social networks are to force grouping to accomplish significant milestones within the game. 

Grouping --> social networks --> retention. 

Games require grouping either because they believe it enhances the revenue stream or because it is such a core to gameplay that players would revolt if you could obtain top tier gear without some imposed cockblock. 

In some ways I hate MMO players for the demands they place on MMOs.  It's making me doubtful that I'll ever be able to enjoy another MMO that isn't built for a smaller, niche market.

Is it the only way?  Wow seems to have "soloized" the MMO experience, to a large extent.  You can play the whole game solo if you want, although some of the very high end content does require grouping.  You don't have to raid to enjoy Wow.  Arena is a nice point in the middle, in that you can participate with only one or two partners.  In the end, it seems to me that social bonding develops social bonding.  Make guilds easy and accessible and chat functions usable-there you will have your answer.

If soloing is less efficient than grouping, people will play in groups. Designers don't have to "force" anybody to do anything... players will automatically gravitate towards efficiency whether it's fun (or even explicitly designed) or not.

But that's only if grouping doesn't leave one highly exposed to risk of lost time or resources. E.g., if levelling by group is more efficient in a side-by-side comparison but the soloer has less aggregate exposure to uncompleted tasks (uncompleted because of people dropping out or because other people are stupid and incompetent), then it doesn't matter that the grouping XP rate gain is technically more efficient. If the grouping mechanism is 'casual-friendly' because the risk exposure is low and the social networks don't require serious effort to maintain, people will readily group.

Some will.  Most won't and will just quit the game.

I don't think players would revolt because you could obtain top tier gear without grouping.  Rather the opposite, I think they would revolt about the time it takes to obtain if you make it take an equivalent number of man-hours to obtain a piece as a soloer as it takes as a grouper/raider. 

Take an example raid and say it takes 2 hours and you down 4 bosses.  Say each boss drops 3 pieces of loot, and the raid is for 48 players.  3 pieces of loot times 4 bosses equals 12 pieces of loot total.  Let's simplify slightly and say that all pieces of loot are tokens or something, making them equally useful for every one of the 48 players on the raid.  Let's also simplify and say that the loot system is such that all players get one item before anyone gets two items.  This means that the raid needs to be run 4 times before every player has a piece of gear.  A 2 hour raid times 4 runs is 8 hours.  Times 48 for the number of players.  That's 384 man-hours.  If time is your metric, then it should take 16 days of /played time for a solo player to obtain a single piece of loot. 

Still ok with it? 

And this is without counting all the time spent learning the encounters in the first place - we came in when the raid was already on farm, for these calculations.  Count the time wiping and learning the encounters, especially if there's no pre-written strategy to follow, and that 384 man-hours per piece of loot is quickly going to increase.

Right. It would be one thing if it was a simple case of "hours spent = progression reward". But in fact, in that setting, the grouper faces a serious risk of non-completion of tasks and non-achievement of progression simply because of the complexity of maintaining a social infrastructure capable of sustaining that effort over the time necessary for all players to achieve progression. Under those circumstances, if there is any alternative where the player controls his risk exposure, he will choose it, even if the loot in the controlled solo or casual-group setting is suboptimal. Suboptimal progression is better than a sizeable risk of time spent for zero results.

2*48 = 96 man hrs
96/12 is 8 man hrs per token.

This. Grouping is by nature more complicated than just soloing. Whatever feature in your game requires active active grouping will be the one fewest players in the game will partake. And I say "active" because something like a random BG match in WoW is just people banging on the BG UI to get into whatever group they can and then doing whatever they want once there. That's what I call "passive" grouping.

You can't force people to want to group. They want the opportunity to do so, but they want to choose the when and for how long. Forcing it upon them annoys them as any forced activity does (sitting/medding in EQ1, battle fatigue in SWG, etc).

This is why people solo in MMOs. It's not them actively chosing to play a crappy RPG alone. It's that they choose to play a light RPG in a world with other people they may want to interact with at some point. Diku MMOs are also a lot easier than your normal RPG, which generally is more complicated and requires a lot more thought than riding the rails through the content gates.

There are a few specific powers like Unstoppable where the AI "knows how to handle it" and pops it at low health. But most of 'em just come out whenever.

I'd like the ability to do a little more AI scripting, like firing off specific powers at low health or even on death -- or get a little more control over specific spawn points and suchlike. I wonder how much they're going to throw at the MA during/after Going Rogue.

Does grouping have to be more efficient in a linear fashion?  That makes almost no sense.  If 5 people can complete a quest in 1 hr, must we force one person to take 5x as long?  There must be a law of diminishing returns applied here.

I do agree with the risk/reward issue brought to the table though.  What my beef is that raiding or grouping should be optional playstyles.  This is not the case in today's MMO.  I think that Blizzard has made a number of leaps to close this gap with faction vendors and dailies that reward tokens, but it still remains obvious that you must overcome a certain social cockblock in order to experience the most dynamic content the game has to offer.   

You want token/hour/person not token/hour

The answer is indeed 8*48. 2x48 achieves 12 tokens, enough for 1/4th of the people to get tokens, or 1/4th of a token per person. Equal time investment required to get 1 token per person is 384

This is really fucking stupid. Where did you come up with the idea that the solo player needs to put in the effort of all 48 raiders? Each raider plays for 8 hours to get loot, so the solo player should also play for 8 hours to get the loot. That way, players can play what is FUN rather than what has the largest carrot.


As an aside, I'm guessing you're referring to EQ1 with your 48m raids, as most modern MMOs (WoW, EQ2) have much smaller raid sizes.

If you're raiding, it's fun because of the loot. Only. Because these are scripted encounters you eventually memorize where the only chance of failure is whether the loot table doesn't work or you're carrying along some newbie that doesn't know the event.

This is why 25 people on a raid playing for four hours equals 100 hours for a solo player. That's the relative investment.

If you'd like a solo player to game the same loot for four hours of investment, then forget having raids at all. Therefore forget having the choicest gear locked behind the hardest boss in the game (at that time). Therefore design your game to withstand the assault of relatively easily-acquired awesome weapons.

Or you can just do what has already been working: Choicest gear that the 25 people shoot for after thousands of cumulative man hours invested in all tiers before that dungeon, with the rabble getting what they can from rep and badge grinds of solo and five mans.

There is nothing wrong with this. It provides adequate rewards against the investment. The endy-endest game stuff is only required for that endy-endest game. If you're not partaking in it, you only need the "best" gear for your category of play.

Any problem with this is largely emotional.

Not when you enjoy dungeon crawls but aren't allowed entry because of your lack of schedulable free time. 

If it takes a group to run a dungeon, then allow me to buy henchlings.  Problem solved.  You can keep the raids and raid gear.  I just want to see a few dungeons without having to wait on idiots or listen to mouth breathers in vent for 4 hours. 

I don't get the distinction, each player in the example only spent an 8 hours doing a 2hr quest 4 times to get their token.  Making a solo player run a 30 min quest 16 times would the functional equivalent minus prep time.  The real question to me is how much you value the prep time and the other difficulties with have a 48-person raid.

It shouldn't take the single player more time to complete an activity if it is SOLOABLE. Its called scaling.... jesus its 2009, playing in groups should net 2-3x xp than solo.

This is the only reason groups get better gear.

Its funny that developers are still struggling with the group, solo, pug vs premade argument. I will pre-order the first mmo that is being designed for 2009.

While I take the gist of your point, I would say that WoW has demonstrated that you can enjoy a significant Solo experience for _much_ of their game; the game still grinds to a halt at level cap with the de jure end of soloing -- there is no character progression without group content... no badges, nothing to spend money on, no craftable items to compare with group content.

To Nebu's point... I would gladly shepherd henchmen with bad AI through a dungeon before I invest in yet another guild (after what, 10-years? I'm over the thrill of virtual communities of liars, cheats and broken human beings).  The fact that I could weigh the benefit of substituting a real human for crappy computerAI should be upside, not a requirement.  Oh yeah, and get of my Lawn.

I will pre-order the first mmo that is being designed for a true Scotsman.

The box comes deep-fried?

World of Whisky

Draughty.

Deep fried whiskey with soloable content.

It's called Alcoholism Online :oh_i_see:

Never solo with alcohol; the group quests are far more entertaining.

Not if it's a PUG.

Pulling it back vaguely on topic: not all grouping is the same. Some games require highly coordinated, large and disciplined groups to pull off the content. Others you can pull a group of strangers together and have a fair shot at success.

It's not really solo vs group. There is a whole continuum from solo to duo to small group to large group to huge group that can then also be sorted by no required abilities up to "content will kick you in the nuts unless you have Navy SEAL-levels of teamwork and discipline".

Seems to me like any group "content" (outside of a raid.. and even there, this applies) can't really kick your ass if you just follow the tank/healer/damage formula. I think most Pugs can even figure that one out. I'm not sure what you mean by Navy seals like discipline. Sometimes a dungeon might be crammed or something, and require you to ease into the encounter a bit.. But I'd hardly call it discipline... since it's always the same game you were playing over and over 10,000 times before. Pull, tank, heal, etc.. It's too dependable to make anything challenging. Unlike many other types of games that change the rules on you from stage to stage/boss to boss.

[edit] That said.. I kind of like pugs/retarded players. It's rare that I find bad ones actually, but I sort of enjoy it when I do. It gives me the illusion that I'm playing something challenging. Swear to god/not being facetious here. For instance, new Blood Elf paladins (when BC came out) were fun. They just rushed headlong Leeroy style into everything.. Everyone ends up skirmishing, trying to fight, heal, bandage, potion at the same time.

I should note that my example was more along the lines of how ridiculous trying to base rewards purely on time spent is in the first place.  Time spent is a really bad way of gating rewards, and if you look at the way it works in games now it's not really that much based on time spent anyway.  Time is a requirement pretty much only because it takes time to present any form of challenge that feels well-paced.  It wouldn't feel anywhere near as fun to go in and have a single 15 minute fight and be done with it.  You need the trash and clearing and such - as annoying as it is when there's too much of it, having none of it wouldn't be that much fun either.

Currently the real metric is error control.  The more people there are, the higher the error tolerance usually is, while the less people there are, the lower the error tolerance.  As a general guideline, not a hard and fast rule, of course.  This has been the case ever since about the Velious Age, where error control became the main point of an MMO fight.  MMO fights in general aren't about reacting to the unexpected, because even the unexpected becomes expected after the 20th time.  Now, as long as we're using error control as a measure of difficulty, in order to make a fight as difficult for one player as it is for 48, 25, or whatever number, you need to make approximately the same number of opportunities to make an error.  That would mean making the fight very very long so that one person has as many opportunities to make an error as an entire raid does in their version of the fight.  If every 10 seconds, in a 25 person raid, each person is capable of making an error, that would mean you have to make the fight 25 times longer if you keep the same pace (error chance every 10 seconds) or increase the timing of error chances while still lengthening the fight.  Because there's no way you can throw 2.5 error chances per second at anyone.  This is all assuming 1 error = wipe, of course, which is usually not the case.  Severity of error will also play a part here, but it's harder to quantify in these back-of-the-envelope calculations.  It should be noted though, that requiring consecutive errors in order to generate a wipe makes it easier if a single person is doing it, because they can pay more attention after the first error and reduce the chances of the second.  In a large group, it's likely one person won't even know that another has made an error until they also make theirs.

And ironically we get back into time spent, only this time it's consecutive time spent since it's all in a single fight.  Because in order to make the fight for a single player as difficult, by the error control metric, as it is for a large group, you'd have to make it many times as long.

What I'm really getting at is that a new way of making fights difficult needs to be determined in order to supposedly allow soloers to get similar rewards to groupers or raiders.  Something that isn't based on error control or cat herding (which is also taken into account as part of the difficulty of the fight, I'm sure).  I'll be damned if I know what fits the bill, though.  But it would have to not only provide equal benefit and challenge to various group sizes, but also figure out some way of making it feel sticky without forcing people into interaction, otherwise there's no point in doing it at all.

Your solution is certainly valid (EQ2, GW), but it is still an emotional challenge. If you don't want to change your gaming preferences nor lifestyle to play the game as designed, that's a choice you're making. It's also a choice that a LOT of people are making though, hence these games devolving ever more into shared-space light RPGs with occasional mass duels.

Some of the funnest times I've had raiding is when things go wrong and we still pull it off. Adds when clearing trash or a boss fight that goes pear shaped. One thing I dislike about WoW raiding is how static and predictable it can be.

Next MMO I play I'm just gonna try to form the shittiest groups possible. [edit] Err, but where there's a slight chance you can survive too.  :grin:

I was thinking about FFXI at the time. And possibly exaggerating. But there is definite discipline involved in "if we don't do this all right the first time, the last 4 hours will have been wasted and we'll be locked out for 24 hours".

Ah.. yeah, I had a feeling you were referring to that. I never got anywhere in that game, but I heard the group dynamic was more demanding. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, I guess.

"Not crap?"

My opinion, worth what you paid, is that all MMG content barring raids should be designed to be completed by a single player, and scale up based on group size. Enemy waves equal to 1 + (party size * 2). Everyone completes the quest when any member of their group does. Everyone gets an "instanced" loot pull at the end.

The tech for this either already exists, or could be designed into the next generation of games.

Consider raiding can be fun without the loot.

There was a time when boss fights had to be figured out for each guild.  Raid sizes were larger then today +50, +75, +100.

Getting a large group of people in one place and something done or many things done in a few hours can be very rewarding.  I am sure some guilds still stay away form spoiler sites just to have that reward of figuring out the fight.

If the raid is > 10 people I doubt it.  Why?  People attending will complain that the leader is an idiot even if they are in the same guild.  MMO's are all about the status quo.  I'd bet that 90%+ care only about their ability to peen wave rather than the actual fun of the game.  Why do I know this?  Because, outside of PvP, the fun in MMOs is VERY limited. 

Players want a pull at the slot machine.  If the pull happens to be a little fun, then all the better.  Darniaq hit the truth.  People raid for the loot and the ability to say that they raided X. 

Oh the folly of mmo's. Mmo developers should insist that players play together in indirect ways than attempting to see how many people can be shoved in the same group. Really beyond 10 people,  no raid is about the fun. Its a logistic nightmare to get more than that many players (even in your own guild), together, on vent (and making sense) and ready to go. Especially when said raid takes several hours to complete.

For me I believe my ideal is a single player online game with a lobby. Give me some chat channels, an auction house and some achievements and gear to show off. Do not give me pvp, groups, or group content. Charge me a subscription and update the game with new content regularly and I would be extremely happy.

I would really like a game where group fighting was all about improvisation and unexpected or random events. PvP is not really that, because it often comes down to dealing with everyone spamming the same exploits or dumb mechanics or it's about FoTM builds pounding on each other. But I completely agree that my favorite PvE group experiences have been playing with people I know and like, having things go kind of pear-shaped for some reason and then somehow surviving anyway. Like when the rogue is the only one still up on a boss that has 5% of its health left and manages to evasion tank it down, or when an off-tank steps in quickly and picks up a mob if the MT goes down unexpectedly, that kind of thing. Where you feel some sense of thrill that something unplanned is happening that depends on quick thinking or people using a class mechanic that they're rarely called upon to employ.

I love quest content that has some feel of this as well. I used to really like City of Heroes' ambush mechanic.

I realize my guild is an exception, but we do it every week. Our TOC attendance is now about 30-40, and we still manage to raid on time and have fun doing it. It helps tremendously that our guild leader and raid organizer is an old EQ vet with lots of experience doing this shit for years and years.

Anywho. I don't think raiding is the zenith of MMOG development, but I do think it gets bashed for whining's sake.

I find this repulsive, but I feel this probably common.  Playing alone with others.

Current issue grouping is not if its required but make up of the groups is required.  Nothing more annoying then having to standing around because you are missing a person with the required skill set.  Some hypothetical game where any 6 players will work (with adjustments) would be ideal.  The trick I suppose is to figure out a way to do this without watering it down and make every one a tank/mage/healer.

What is groups actually had named slots and a classes ability were adjusted by which slot they in.  Leader deciding who is in what slot.  Classes are more of theme than a skill set.

Say: Tank, PrimDPS, SecDPS, PrimHeal, SecHealer, and Util.  Obviously give them cooler names.  Also adds a little strategy layer deciding who is what slot depending on encounter.

The better players would rather play alone or with players of their skill level or higher.  This will always be the case unless the person is very empathetic or has a pre-existing social network that they are willing to make concessions for.  

My gaming time is valuable to me.  I don't want it squandered because someone fails to pay attention or is just plain bad at games.  This is my primary motivation for following the rule above.  I consider myself a competent and attentive player.  I expect people gaming with to be at least as competent and attentive as I am.  I don't want to waste their time either.  You don't have to be my age to know that the most valuable thing all of us have is our time.  Particularly our free time.

I play games until I exhaust the solo content or the content I can do with a good friend.  I'm accepting of this for the most part, but still get irritated that I'm forced to group just to see parts of the game that I would have otherwise enjoyed.  Perhaps I'm not alone and there will be a game made that caters to my playstyle.  As the average age of the MMO gamer increases, this possibility seems more likely.

Speak for yourself? The loot is nice, don't get me wrong, but I raid plenty of stuff in WoW that I can't get much (or really any before they changed the badge system) reward from. I mean when you get down to it, nobody does just about *anything* in an MMO without a carrot of some kind. Why single out raiding as "oh you people only do this for the loot"?

Because the loot from raiding has to be so much better than the loot from everything else, otherwise people don't bother.

Lots of people will do quest X, or dungeon Y, even though it's not quite as good as dungeon F.  Very few people will do a raid unless it's considerably better reward than the dungeons or quests.  This doesn't display the need for a carrot - it displays the need for a carrot big enough and tasty enough to overcome the adversity to doing this in the first place.

If raids were designed to be done 1-3 times and then never run again, then sure, people would do them for fun.  But when they're designed to be done infinity+1 times, at least until the next raid comes out, at which point you can switch to doing IT infinity+1 times, that's not really going to happen.

Time is the sole prerequisite to everything in an MMO.  What differentiates raids and renders them unfun is the recurring time penalty (forming up, wipes, repair bills, trash pulls, consumable buffs).  People can and do live with having to form up, and having to pull trash.  Wipes, and the resulting repair bills and multiplied consumables costs causes people to ragequit.  If raids weren't a losing proposition for people who already have the gear they would in all probability be more adventuresome.

If its the same, then why do the raid? Everyone who wants loot will do the smaller things that they can do whenever they want, then get together for group activities solely on whether or not that is fun. That isn't to say that that is a bad model, but it is to say the motivation to do the activity needs to not be loot.

Also consider this

If 8 hrs solo = 1 token
8 hours group = 1 token per person

After 2 hours of the group, the 12 people who have gotten a token will leave, and do solo stuff for 8 hours and have 2 tokens in 10 hours, of 5 hours per token. The other 36 need to find 12 more people for the group and risk not getting a token. At the end of the next 2 hours, the 12 that got a token leave and do solo work getting another token in 8 hours. Now they have 2 tokens in 12 hours at 6 hours/token.

This is much more an issue with pick up games than regulars, but it illustrates the point. If your model is at all focused on doing group activities for loot then they aren't going to get many people doing them. People will do solo stuff for loot and then do fun stuff together.

Then again, i think that would be an interesting model.

E.G. Lets say you have at least two types of "quests", solo quests, and group quests.

Solo quests only grant items as rewards and no XP of any kind. Group quests only grant XP and only low value consumable items/chump change in the amount expected to be used[So you don't have to do solo quests in order to have money for pots]

Players advance when they play in a group, and get better loot when they play alone.  The only exception to that is that i would add a base level of equipment that would be "gifted" to you when you went up a level.

Now you don't have to worry about solo quest takers advancing faster or slower than group quests, and you can tailor the quests to each class that is doing it so that its a fun and enjoyable experience and works with their class abilities. Now you don't have to worry about people "not getting some" or people who play more "getting ahead" of your group.

The problem, as always, with 'progress only in group' systems is that those systems are bad for new players once the main mass of players has progressed past their level. Even sidekicking type systems don't solve the issue completely as sidekicking usually requires you to at least know someone who is willing to take you on (very very rarely do you see someone take on an unknown low level sidekick in CoH in a PUG situation) and also the opportunities tend to dry up when the big mass of players hits max level.

Solo leveling, when there's any kind of 'endgame' that people are shooting for, needs to be possible simply so new players have a chance of catching up and participating.

Maybe there's a reason for that?

That's really funny.  I just did this in DDO, a quest calls iInvaders.  Each time you do the quest, each person in the group gets 2,3 or 5 tokens depending on which end-boss spawns.  25 tokens get a great item especially for healers.  It real nasty quest with lots of beholders, instana-death and negative levels.  I joined a guild group in progress farming this.  They finished getting their tokens and did it an extra time to pass all their tokens to me so I could get my item.  And this is after they were already sick to death of the quest and for some random slob.  This was quite shocking to me and didn't expect it all.

As to your example, I would structure it like

Item = 16 tokens
Solo: 30min / once a day/ 1 token
Group: 60min / once a day / 2 tokens each
4 groups: 120min / once a day / 4 tokens each

So raids can get it done faster in real time, but the man hours per token are same.  And if you get behind your guild raid you can catch up with solo and group version in addition to raid quest.

Yes. And the reason is the uber carrot. If there's not always something just out of reach from most players, then players feel they are done with getting new things. And if you don't need new things to tackle new things, then it's just a boring grind at the end game.

Valid, but finite, and the difference between Raiding and a long series of well-run well-crafted D&D modules. Raiding can be about the adventure of figuring things out. But how long does that last before people bail for guaranteed drops?

And that's the reason why raid sizes have gotten smaller. It's cheaper to manage slot machines than it is to keep ahead of players with new D&D modules. So instead of worrying about how to deliver those modules, they lowered the barrier of entry for raids (while of course still making more of them). And it's worked well so far.

And yes, this is absolutely all just my opinion. I honestly don't know how people can raid for years. I never liked it before WoW, could only stomach it when my guild had pretty much figured out the bosses in WoW, and haven't done it since.

Edit to add: Realize that came out a bit harsh. Raiding falls in the category of "to each their own" for me, as in, not for me. But plenty of people like it apparently. I'd think it's primarily for the chance of loot, but for those who do like to figure it out, that's months of enjoyment too. So yea, just not for me.

Pretty sure the reason raid sizes are smaller is because it's something waaaaay more people like and can achieve. I never raided until there was 10 man raiding, because I didn't want to join an official RAID GUILD. That ain't fun for me.

Little raids, though, that I can do in my little casual guild? Good times. And it's not the loot, at least not for me. Otherwise I wouldn't have done Karazhan the bajillion times I did. Although I admit something I enjoy is taking someone new into a raid and hearing them be all "oh man, that's cool" at the visuals, or a fun fight, or whatever.

Not saying raiding is 100% awesome fun, and I probably wouldn't do it weekly without loot carrots for SOMEONE in the raid (I do still raid/do dungeons I wouldn't get anything out of), but I think some people put way too much emphasis in their own minds on loot as to why people do it. Of course, some people who do it put too much emphasis on the loot for why they do it, so it probably balances out. :P

I've always wondered if the people who dislike raiding also abhor team sports.   That's the view I've always taken of it, and why it's fun for me.  Accomplishing things as a group that you couldn't accomplish on your own.  Yes, it's sort of a forced and contrived method of doing it, but then so are sports.  1v1 is never as much fun as team play, imo.  If there was no loot progression, I'd still do it.

Hell, it's half the reason I still enjoy running PUG 5-mans, just seeing if the team can overcome the mandatory idiot.

Well, as someone who doesn't like raiding picture this:

A softball team where the pitcher constantly berates the other players for the slightest mistakes in the field, but gives the female shortstop a pass because he wants to doink her. The outfielders are all pissed off because they hit the vast majority of home runs and never pass up an opportunity to share that fact, and they are secretly planning on forming their own softball team full of home-run hitters because "they're tired of being held back". Meanwhile everyone is pissed at the third baseman because he's 14 years old and his mother tends to show up and haul him out of games to do chores. The catcher is a college student but cannot speak past a 3rd grade level and talks mostly in internet memes. The second baseman is a nice guy, but he's epileptic and never fails to have seizures at a critical point in the game.

After a few games on teams like this, its not surprising that people opt to play golf instead.   

You've not played CoH/V then?  :grin: That's pretty much 90% of the content. The enforced team stuff are the Task Forces / Strike Forces.

Fuck quest. I want grinding to be that way. Remember a wee old game called prisontale that was grindy as fuck but when there was 300 players in an area, there was 300000000000000000 mobs to kill. Those were good times.

Yeah, see, you think you're making a clever analogy but that IS your average softball team of random people.   Fuck, that's almost my office, just add 5 years to the 3rd baseman's age.  

Perhaps you should find a team of like minded individuals, or just admit you don't like softball and stop bitching about those guys while you're playing golf.

You have every right to bitch moan and complain if you have to play softball. Which in some social settings were having a softball team is a given it is almost mandatory because you just don't want to be that guy who is "too good for softabll". The whole "find like minded individuals" is the primary reason why people don't play softball. It may sound immature to complain about shitty softball teams when you're playing golf but the only reason why softball would be brought up is if someone as insisting you play softball.

The joy of team play with people who are most or all as skilled as you also requires that most or all of them take the game as seriously as you do.   Having one screw-up along who at least plays skillfully and fills a void in the team, or shepherding along a less-skilled player as they learn to up their game to the next level is usually doable.  It gets exponentially harder and less fun with more than one though.

I find it ironic that back in the day, WoW introduced max level content for 5- and 10-man groups as a dramatic alternative to raiding.  Now it seems some people are calling that raiding as well?

But back to the team sport analogy, barring American football, how many sports actually field teams of 30 or 40 people?  And does any sport actually have more than 12 or so playing at a time?

Australian Rules Football is 18 a side.

Rugby Union is 15 a side.

Michael Jordan isn't going to play a serious game of basketball on the same court with a kindergartener just because he answered an LFG queue.  There are numerous filters in sport that stratify skill levels such that competition occurs between/among players with some minimum competency level.  Sport comparisons would actually be more fitting analogies to arena matches, particularly if they streamlined the brackets to be based more on player skill than gear or class gimic builds. 
 

And you could design game were you make a character, one-shot god, and spend eternity completing how awesome you are. So what?  This basic issue is that players go through content like locust and we are discussing how slow them down without pissing them off. Sure you can Monty Hall the game, but you haven't solved a thing.  

Do you think rats discuss what is optimum rate to dispense cheese to motivate them to run an infinity series of mazes?

You don't have to play softball, though. You can play basketball instead. You won't get an awesome new softball glove if you play basketball, but who cares if you're not ever going to PLAY softball?

Also, you don't have to team up with morons you don't like. I always raid with morons I DO like.  :why_so_serious:


Edit:


Ten man is raiding. Blizzard considers it such. Five mans are not, and Blizzard is getting better and better at making that a satisfying progression alternative. Smaller than that, though, you're mostly out of luck unless you like to PvP.

No thank you, my cock still hurts from the punching it got from Drakkisath four years ago.

Bastard still hasn't dropped my deflector.

I'll post more at a better time of day, but for now I'll just say that a shiny modern version of UO would make a lot more of you people happy than you think. Or to put it in a way that might be a bit more relatable for some people, imagine Diablo 2 with a real MMO built around it. All characters can solo everything but all play differently. People play in small groups because they want to, not because it's specifically required to access content. Groups larger than half a dozen or so don't exist, because why would you want them to?

To go back to the softball analogy, which is a good one:

If that softball team is your office, then it's fun (to the extent to which you like the people you work with). Because it's a social event with people you know and like, and all the weird interpersonal stuff is just life as you live it. When MMO groups are the equivalent of bowling night with familiar people, they're fine, whatever it is that you're doing. If you're competitive, maybe you push the group towards being better. Some neighborhood bowling leagues are pretty damn good, after all.

If that softball team is the result of showing up in a field when you say, "I like softball, I'd like to play some" and having a RNG assign you randomly to a group of eight other people who've been chosen from 500 who showed up at the same field at the same time, it's something else entirely. Now you have no reason to think warmly about the kid or the meme-spouting catcher or to roll your eyes about the lustful pitcher: all you want to do is finish the fucking game and get the hell away from these people that you don't know--and so there's no fun involved along the way. Now if that softball game is only ten minutes long and then you get to shuffle in with a different group of eight players, maybe you'll hit on some fun groups along the way. If that game is two hours long, it's a different matter.

Love raiding. Hate team sports.

I'm actually pretty self-aware of how much I'd like to try something UO-ish.

Exactly. I'm not saying that all raiders are a bunch of maladjusted retards. My Kara/ZA/Naxx groups were all with people I liked hanging out with. When things are going smoothly raiding is rather fun, and when things aren't going smoothly being with people you know and like in the first place helps with the frustration and the tedium.

The thing is though it took me literally years to find that group of people to raid with that didn't make me want to stab my eyes out. Now if I want to resub back to WoW and pick up raiding with those folks again, that's great, but the thought of going to another game and having to wade through all the crappy, dysfunctional groups to find other people I'd actually want to raid with doesn't fill me with happy.

I like doing things with friends.  I'm terrified of strangers, even virtual ones.  I suck at sports and dislike most competition but dig on cooperative ventures.

I like team sports.
I like online team sports.
I like raiding.. sometimes.

I love raiding but I hate the time commitment of X days per week or fitting into an exact schedule.  Especially living with my girlfriend.

None of my real life friends play video games anymore so I have to rely on virtual friends that come and go.  I'd probably be playing WOW still if I had a solid anchor of people playing.  I did once, but they all mostly sucked at the game however they were good people and fun to hang out with.

Anyway, raiding is fun, regardless of your personal motivation.  You just have to find the right circumstances.  There is still to much stigma placed on "raiding" in the eyes of casual/solo/whatever players.  Shouldn't be though.

Well, part of the reason casual players loathe raiding is because raiders were such giant cockgobbling assholes about it.

These are good points. I think when a lot of people say they don't like forced groups, they really mean they don't like forced groups with people they don't want to group with. I mean like assholes, ex-boyfriends, people who speak a completely different language, their mother-in-law, griefers, hackers, child molesters, etc.

If you think solo play doesn't belong in MMOs, you need to play every day only between 3 AM and 3:45 AM, on a Chinese server (unless you speak Chinese, in which case French or some other language you don't know). And if you cannot find a group in the first 15 seconds, you must log off and try again tomorrow.

I would love raiding if I could make X number of clones of myself to do so.

I think this a great introspective question. And I think it changes for everyone as they go through life stages. It certainly has for me and many of my friends. What I liked and wanted to do at 29 is very different from 39. I actually love team sports but mostly dislike raiding except in short spurts. For two reasons:

• Team sports are PvP against an adaptive AI. So while the activity might be easy (catch and run, or just catch, or bump-to-spike, etc), the ever-changing conditions keep you constantly engaged. Raids never change, unless they patch something.
• Team sports are generally short-ish in duration by comparison. I'm no pro athlete, so softball is something you play on and off for a few hours between beers and food. 15 or 21 point volleyball can go by pretty quick so you can get a bunch of games in, between beer and food and socializing. Raids require constant focus for a duration that'll only change after a few weeks or months of getting better at serious practice.

The closest comparison I've found to the team sports I play is FPS games and DoTA-style matches like LoL. I'm not in a clan or anything. I don't care to make that kind of investment. But the match types I play require just enough mental process to coordinate at a level I want to invest against the kind of changing conditions I want to adapt to.

Ultimately, I reach a threshold where I know that to "get better" at something requires a deeper investment. But with my current lifestyle, I need to channel my "get better" desires to other things.

So.. basically the argument against raiding is, "I might find a guild full of assholes, and I can't be bothered to quit them and find another guild.  So instead I'll denigrate those who have bothered to find folks they like playing with, because it makes me feel better."

Because hey, if you're avoiding stuff because you might meet assholes, make sure you don't go out in public.

There are a few types of mindsets that dislike raiding.

• The lazy people, as you describe.  Can't be bothered looking for a group of like minded people to have fun with.
• The sensible group who are like Darniaq.  Boss fights are fun for the 5-10 minute duration.  The boring "dungeon crawling" aspect where you go through a few tunnels and pull trash.  Yawn.  There is no sense of danger or mystery.  Overall the experience is still staring at your computer screen concentrating on something but not enjoying the gaming session.
• The other group of sensible people who dislike the time investment or just don't like grouping with other people.

The only mentality I never understood were the people who think that since they solo they should be "entitled" to the same rewards of doing dungeons, whether they are single group or multi group dungeons.  What I do get is their frustration if their progress is stunted due to lack of content and the only new stuff being added are dungeons and raids.

Good post though Darniaq.

--
Edit to add:

I still hold that the "next best thing" or whatever you want to term it, will be an MMOG that is more action oriented.  Like a Zelda or Demon Soul or Borderlands.  It will not be another MMOG with autoattack and hotbars.

Requiring concentration from the majority of the raid on the trash clears is one of the things that kind of irritates me about more recent MMO's.  One thing I notice, looking back at EQ, was that for the most part, trash clearing was a background activity.  It occupied time, but you didn't have to pay so much attention to it that it prevented you from socializing or going afk relatively often.  It was not uncommon to have 1/8 to 1/4 of the raid AFK at any given time during EQ trash clearing phases, another 1/2 barely paying attention and just hitting their assist button and autoattacking, while they watched TV or chatted with their friends, and just the few people who played key roles (and enjoyed the constant attention requirement) were the ones concentrating on the raid.

As for action MMO, YES PLEASE.  No, not this faux-action shit that Champions tried to foist on us, where it's still exactly the same as any other MMO with its standard 'target enemy, use abilities' combat, but real action combat like you see in action games.  The only quasi-MMO I've ever played that did this well, and it did it really well was Phantasy Star Universe.  Unfortunately that game had so many other problems with it I never stuck around, but if you gave me that kind of combat in a real MMO instead of a game where there's ten little instanced paths filled with mobs to go through (only two or three of which are good enough on the difficulty to reward curve to actually do) I will buy that game and play it probably for a very long time as long as there's no glaring flaws to drive me away.

Edit to add: And with a game like that where the combat itself is really fun just going out and killing stuff, you could get rid of 90% of the quests so this quest grind nonsense wouldn't be there either.  Instead you'd just have a few large overarching goals within each zone.  Kind of like Aion's campaign quests, only bigger and a little less discrete.  Give a final goal and some suggestions on how to accomplish it, but don't require anything but the final goal.  Give as many potential ways of accomplishing it as possible too, this'd naturally branch out into allowing for both group and solo play.  Taking a quick example from Aion since it's on my mind, if your goal is to destroy an abyss gate, you could systematically weaken the enemy in various places in the zone, thus permitting you access to secret, less defended passages (since you consumed much of their strength, they can't defend those passages) to let you sneak in and sabotage it.  Or you could get a group of friends together, screw weakening the enemy, and just make a full frontal assault. 

And since you don't have to constantly lead people by the nose since hey, going out and killing shit is just plain fun, you don't have to give them all these mini-goals that quests do in current games just to keep the person engaged.  Give the players more and more combos and that sort of advancement path and make them entertaining and visually appealing and they'll want to go out and kill shit.

Lord above, that sounds horrible. Really, really horrible. I understand people do different things to turn their minds off but it just seems to me like cutting raid sizes down to, oh, 10 or 25, where they all have to, oh I don't know, do something crazy like play the game they have logged into and are paying for is a better way to do it. And I dunno about non-WoW raids, but you can still watch TV and clear trash in WoW, just don't suck at two things at once.  :awesome_for_real:

Blizzard is getting better with the trash I think - I like that I have to give a shit on Ulduar trash, and it doesn't make me want to punch people because there isn't much of it (pre-watchers, anyway, Thorim is the only watcher that doesn't seem to have way more trash than is necessary). We'll see how Icecrown is.

Come on. Most people avoid situations where they might have to spend multiple hours cooped up with total strangers trying to accomplish an objective. Most people even screen opportunities for socializing around the question, "Do I think I'll have fun with these people on this occasion?" We all accept that some public activities carry a risk that you'll end up having to deal with an asshole. If I go to a baseball game, I know there's a chance there will be an asshole in the stands next to me. But that's different from investing time in a leisure activity where the average experience is going to put you with a bunch of strangers who are very likely to be off-putting at best.

It's not that raiding with likeable people that you feel connected to is bad. It's that most group-oriented content in a MMO needs to be targeted at experiences that require less time, less prior organization, and less strong social connection during the experience, where grouping is a more spontaneous and less demanding dynamic. Again, I think Toontown is a pretty decent model: it encourages grouping in two different contexts (street fighting and cleaning Cogs out of buildings), the grouping is semi-automated, it is more fun to be in a group in several respects (as well as necessary for building content), but the groups don't need to be persistent and the coordination of group activity is fairly undemanding.

If MMO's want raiding, PQ's are the better way to go.  No organization, no lengthy setup, and no social heirarchy required.  Fast in, fast out while still requiring a gaggle-o-people to complete.  Something similar to epic mobs in CoH coupled to a WAR PQ would do the trick nicely.  It would be easily accessed by casual players and reduce the barrier to entry for those players with limited play time. 

I don't mind the organization or the time required for raiding or any other complex game elements.  It's the actions that I'm performing while doing so.  When I raided, it was boring as shit until we got to a boss.  We would stand in one spot and pull mobs and kill them in a predetermined order.  The bosses were fun, and the sense of "beating" an encounter was pretty good, especially with a group of friends.  Everything in between was dull and non-engaging.  Outside the Tank, Leader and/or Puller/Marker everyone was just a lemming and you were not required to think at all.

..

Khaldun:  Most people do avoid situations where you're with strangers for multiple hours.  That is why it's important to find a good social circle of people in game and get to know them.  Unless you PUG everything all day.  That can become awful.

I also disagree group oriented content should require less and less time.  Organization? Purhaps.  There are games coming out with "soft" grouping.  I know Jumpgate discussed that to a certain degree.  There is room for a lot of different play styles I think.

Edit to add:
Nebu I think PQs are a great idea if the were done differently that WAR.  It's got to be more involved other than killing 100 random mobs in this area, then 10 elite mobs then one big boss.  It needs to be more of a scripted event, even if it's instanced.  I always like that boss fight in ZF in WOW where you fight on the stairs.

I also think there should be raids as well.  But PQs are great thing.

I would happily engage in raiding if I

a) didn't have to have my time wasted by inattentive people.

b) didn't get berated for my lack of knowledge, gear, guild, etc. 

c) didn't have to play my toon, that I'm paying for, in a manner prescribed by someone else. 

First game to allow me to do dungeon crawls and raids in a more user-friendly manner than WoW will get my money.  Hell, give me henchmen (a la Guild Wars) and I'll do it myself.   

Only, with PQ's, the fights couldn't actually involve any serious amount of coordination or challenge.  I mean, shit, look at pug raiding in wow.  Even with as easy as a lot of those fights are, and as overgeared as people are for them, it's still infuriating just to try to get a bunch of people to not be complete idiots for 5 minutes.  And that's with some actual organization and leadership, and a tiny bit of screening out the worst of the idiots.  I didn't get past the first dozen levels in WAR.  Were there any PQ's that actually required coordination and organization?  Were they completed on anything resembling a regular basis by randoms, if there were?  Or were they all like the lowbie zone ones, 'kill a bunch of shit, kill some more shit, then pile on the boss until it dies'?

It's fun having to have a reasonably organized force doing reasonably organized and competent tasks in order to win.  Some of the mechanics need a good bit of work, but there's nothing wrong with the concept of fights that require coordination and competence that is simply unavailable from 'whatever random people show up'.

And it's not entirely automatic or without skill. A well-designed PQ still has a failure possibility. A PQ shouldn't just be built around zerging. Using the Toontown example, if you're in a Cog building where the players aren't vastly overlevelled for the Cogs in the building, you succeed or fail based on whether players coordinate their actions well either intuitively or using the limited communication system. Failure isn't overly punishing, but neither is success an automatic consequence once you have enough people to overwhelm the quest or task.

EDIT: Beat me to it.

The reason people flinch at the PQ concept is because it hasn't been implemented to its potential yet.  I think it's the future of raiding.  It just needs to have the kinks worked out. 

Totally. That's the next step in vanilla diku-derived MMO design: PQs that are both challenging, light in their time/commitment demands and relaxed in the prior social arrangements that have to be undertaken.

"PQ done right" is definitely an interesting design challenge.

Just because you can fail doesn't mean they require serious coordination to succeed.  They may involve challenge, but that's more along the lines of 'how many complete idiots did we get this time'.  Because if it's designed to be done by a random group, there can't be any expectation of close synergy between people, the best you can expect is a rudimentary plan that enough people will follow to not fail horribly.

It seems to me that because players keep demanding less and less involvement with other people in these games and more freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, MMO's in general are continually heading toward ever increasing heights of blandness that lose a lot of the stuff that is really fun but has a higher barrier to entry.

This is why WUA is right in respects to Ultima Online.

I disagree.  I want to interact with people.  I just want to interact in such a way that they can't fuck with my gaming time.  I want to be the one to decide when I come and go without having to consider how my actions might inconvenience someone else.  I think this can be accomplished without diluting games.  I just want my games to emphasize fun more and cat herding less.

I am having a little trouble reconciling this with your stated preference for a set 8v8 group in DAOC, I think. It sounds like what you want is the Alb zerg - zone in, join chat, stick with the crowd til you need to leave, then move on. Maybe it is just a case of your taste in gaming changing over the years, or maybe you see PVP as just a different type of thing?

They just need to instance PQs so they can be soloed.   :oh_i_see: Maybe put some phasing in there so the world changes but only in your version of the instance.  :awesome_for_real:

you may be joking but that is a good idea actually.

What a bullshit answer.

People are strangers because you've chosen to not get to know them.  That's no fault of theirs, it's yours.  The rest is just fluff you're using to pump a crappy answer.

See, your friends are assholes.  You're an asshole.  That guy down the street everyone likes and gets along with? He's an asshole, too.   Everyone on this planet is an asshole, there's no avoiding it.  The question of how well you know them is what mitigates that asshole factor in your mind.  I guarantee that.

What bullshit are you spouting? People are strangers because you are too lazy to get a chance to know them? Where do you fucking live? People are strangers because people are fucking strangers, and even if you spent 3 years sitting at the same fucking water cooler your fucking strangers. JUST because you have the opportunity to socialize, DOES not mean it leads to anything remotely desirable. The fact that you post that in this forum is hilarious.

First you say you don't like having to have your whole raid dimly aware you're clearing trash, now you don't like that MMOs are going to get too "bland." Make up your mind! :P

I can sympathize with the people who want to do cool shit with a minimum of interaction with strangers who are possibly going to be stupid assholes, but ... I don't think "find a guild of people you like if doing cool shit that requires other people is that important to you" is an unreasonable bit of advice.

I think that's only true for people who don't like raiding, which makes it a pretty circular argument.  To go back to the sports analogy, there's a pretty good chance that everytime you step onto the basketball court you're going to be surrounded by people you hardly know trying to accomplish an objective.  Same I imagine is true for softball/soccer/whatever field.  Part of the fun is winning and part of the fun is spending time with people who share a common goal, even if they're on the other team.  I think the fact that the evolution Interweb 'relationships' mirror what happens on the court and I'd assume in other places where people of like minds gather (say from, "Hey" "Yeah. Hey there" to "Fuck he sucks."  to "You live around here?") is the reason people tend to get sensitive about it.

Pretty obvious that people who don't like people won't like raiding and that a certain number of them are going to try to maximize it's negatives if only to satifsfy themselves that they're not missing out on anything; See: People will only raid if the loot is ENOURMOUS conversation.  In my experience (by that I mean almost exactly a metric fuckton of raiding) if you ask 72 people to list the 10 reasons why they raid in descending order the only thing that they'll all have in common is that loot won't be on the top of the list.  Given the amount of time you'll spend raiding between drops it seems absurd to think that it's the loot that keeps people coming back.  If that were the case Aion/L2/FFwhateverthefuck would just need to add Huge Purple Items as rewards upon levelling to keep their playerbase.  Seems unlikely.

Generally speaking raiding in it's current form offers rewards to people who enjoy team based accomplishment and is incomprehnsible and denigrated by people who don't.

It's more about the buttonmashiness of newer games that I was commenting on, as well as the fact that even trash tries to tune for everyone being there and paying attention.  In WoW, in order to be effective at just about any class, I have to be pressing buttons every two to three seconds.  In EQ, depending on my class I might be pressing a button anywhere from once every three to four seconds, to once every ten seconds or even more.  More button presses don't make the combat more fun for me, but they do mean I can't do other things while I'm playing - like chatting with my friends, since I can't type if I have to mash buttons every 2 seconds.

While that advice doesn't seem unreasonable, more and more people are demanding the ability to do the cool shit that requires a group, only without a group.  The trouble is, by removing the need for a group, much of the fun is also removed.  But it's being done anyway.  If PQ's become the new raid mechanic, and they very well might, given time, then we can look forward to a future of no more fights of significant complexity.  Only rudimentary organization will be needed, because it has to be defeatable by a random bunch of people who've never done anything together before and aren't going to stick around to learn a complex encounter that requires precision timing and organization.

Everything in WoW (which is to say, modern diku in general) is way too tightly controlled. PVE can't be unpredictable, it has to be rigidly scripted so that the boss can have it's damage turned up 2% and it's health dialed down 3% because the spreadsheet says this is optimal for the rate of content consumption the developers want to set.

Anything that drops really good loot has to have some sort of lockout timer, otherwise players might get geared up faster than the schedule the developers have in mind. And everything has to be soulbound, because heaven forbid someone skip part of the designated course of content consumption.

There's a line of solo content that pretty much has a sign on it that says "THIS IS THE SOLO PART, AREN'T WE COOL FOR HAVING THIS? GROUP UP FOR THE BETTER SHIT!" because for some reason the game is built to encourage cooperation and logistics first, and fun second. I'm sure if you polled a bunch of raiders none of them would check the "Validating my life through e-peen!" box, but I have too many friends/acquaintances who raid and talk shit to me about their idiot guildmates to buy that they're all just doing it for the fun and camaraderie.

This is ultimately what drove me away from blizz' raid design as they ratcheted raid sizes down and skill requirements up, replacing organization and social capital with min/maxing and reaction time as the main determinants for success. It was fun for a while, but this ping-intensive, small scale, visceral gameplay (not bad per se but increasingly preeminent) also sidelines the principle virtue of the genre: the "Massive" in "MMO" -- the marvel of politicking, competition, community, directing large groups of people; all this is lost as devs try increasingly to shunt people off into their own little directed experience: safe from 'assholes', variability, or really any unpleasantness at all.

But what the fuck is the point? I see increasingly little reason for the "massive" part at all in modern game design.

That's one of the things that has always irked me greatly about WoW raiding.  They seem to have this need to control every little thing.  And instead of designing monsters and letting us figure out how to defeat them, they design exactly how the monster is intended to be defeated.  And anything that varies from that intended plan is either an exploit or gets nerfed.  WoW takes this to an extreme that isn't seen in most games.  Even among dikus it is the pinnacle of lead by the nose and allow no one to deviate even slightly from the prescribed path.  

You never saw that level of it in EQ, for example.  There, you clearly got the sense that they designed a monster, gave it abilities they thought would be interesting/challenging/cool, and then left it up to us to determine how to defeat it.  If it turned out easier than they expected, there was always the next one down the road.  If it turned out harder than they expected, well that's how it goes.  Only on a few rare occasions did you see them get bent out of shape because players came up with an unexpected and creative strategy.  This was pretty similar in other games I've played too, except WoW, where pretty much anything other than the exact strategy they plan for us to use is disallowed.  And of course there was even less guiding back in UO, at least when I played, since it pretty much just plunked you down in the middle of Britain and sent you on your way to figure everything out on your own, and didn't ever seem to change the rules just because you got creative.  'Least, not in the early days, don't know about after I left.

And no, none of us that like raiding are doing it just for the fun and camaraderie.  There does indeed have to be worthwhile loot - if there's not enough of a tangible bonus, we won't do it.  Because as fun as it is, it's also a lot of work, and the fun comes from the key moments, while the work is pretty much constant - especially for the leaders.  And yeah, there's always the idiots, gone back to all the raids I've ever been in there's always someone, or a few someones.  (And the idiot quality seems to be improving, by which I mean they're getting stupider and more annoying).  But there's always the people that you do like, unless you joined a guild full of people you hate just to get the loot and nothing else.  And again, unless you're in the wrong guild, the ones you like, or are at least neutral on, are the majority.  And you know, when you finally defeat that hard boss, especially before strategies were spoonfed from websites and you actually had to put effort in with your guildmates in learning and figuring things out for yourself, there's that moment of awesome and even the idiots are part of that awesome, if only for a moment.  I remember many fights from EQ when we finally won, how fun it was working up to that and how great it was winning.  My favorite raid I've ever done was the first one I led, and the first time I set foot in the Plane of Sky.  We didn't know much about the place other than a few basics from some descriptions.  Learned everything as we went along.  Didn't make it to our goal, but it was still the best raid I've ever done.  I don't remember many like that from WoW, because I always felt like the only thing holding us back - since we had the strategy spoonfed in the first place - was the idiots, so instead of a moment of awesome it was just 'sheesh, finally they stopped screwing up for once'.

To sum up: Tightly controlled, 'theme-park' content sucks, whether it's quests leading you through a bunch of predetermined points of interest in a specific order while killing 10 rats at each one, or whether it's raids that you must follow a specific developer-designed strategy and anything else is disallowed.

And yeah, you're right about UO - I know I would jump at playing old UO, updated for the new age.  Especially if it had pvp, perhaps on a system similar to the way I understand EVE's is, where you go from 'almost complete safety' to 'wild frontier' gradually.

No, I pretty much do it for the fun and to blow a few hours in a game with folks I know entirely online and enjoy hanging around with. Much like BSing on this forum it gains me nothing but entertainment.

It's why I still run through low level instances or will run dungeons I need nothing from.  I gear up only to help the raid and because it's required to hit that next tier.   I'm very much a team player and social animal.. something that is unusual for traditional vid. gamers, I know.


Anywho, I agree with Koyasha on the strictness of WoW raiding, it's very unforgiving to a degree.  I believe part of it stems from the fact that even though there were many ways of killing a mob in EQ (including Zerg rush!) there were only one or two "Best" or "Most efficient" ways.  Given the Min/Max nature of MMO players, that meant there was a defacto  one or two ways to kill that boss.   Blizzard just seems to have codified that by scripting encounters a lot more.   Their view appears to be that your chance for doing things differently is swapping the distribution of and number of classes.  Yes, you may need to avoid this and hit that widget at a certain time, but you don't have to have a warrior tank and 5 priests chaincasting while limiting the number of melee due to mob pushback or else you fail.  Something you had to do in EQ and seems obscured by the mists of nostalgia.

Also, we forget that a lot of the scripting was added because Tank and Spank was incredibly boring for healers.. and most of EQ's and MC's bosses were just that. The majority of the activity was done by the melee dps and the tank.  Ranged and healers just stood around 90% of the time or moved back into position after a knockback.

Fuck Quest driven content-  Fuck 10 rats.

In a row?

I still want to see somebody copy the Doom Gauntlet from UO.

You go down to the dungeon, and there's a quest you have to do first. You need to go farm X number of bones from dungeon creatures, with tougher creatures dropping more, in order to get a gold skull that acts as a key for you and your party to get into the gauntlet itself. It doesn't take terribly long, but if you don't like it you can buy the skull directly off another player. Or if you don't mind farming, you can farm the shit out of it and sell the skulls to people as a way of making cash. Whatever.

Then you get in there, and it's a huge chamber with five large rooms connected to it. Each room spawns anywhere from one to four bosses at once, depending on how many people are down there at the moment. The spawns are cycled such that each room needs to be cleared in turn, so that everyone is making a big circle through the gauntlet. Once a full circuit has been completed, the main boss(es) spawn in the center chamber for everyone to try and kill. When they die, the whole thing starts over again.

There's no rolling. Loot drops directly into your inventory, and your odds of getting a drop depend upon how much damage you've done to bosses and how many kills you've participated in. (There are no dedicated tanks or healers obviously.) An hour and a half will let you do two or three circuits and that's usually enough to get you a drop. If not, you're pretty much guaranteed a quick drop next time since your kill points persist and only reset when you do get something.

You can go down there solo, or with a couple friends, or as part of a large guild group. There's no guarantee that what you get will be what you want, or even particularly useful to you. But there's no such thing as soulbound gear, so you can sell/trade the stuff you have to get the stuff you want. Or you can just brush off the entire system, make money doing something else, and buy all the stuff you want without setting foot in there.

It has it's weaknesses, but never did you feel a developer's hand on the back of your neck, pushing you into what they think you ought to be doing. I'd REALLY like to see such a system done as something more than a mid-life addition to a very old game. Of course the guy behind the expansion that added it to UO was Evocare, aka fucking Kalgan at Blizzard now. Go figure.

A significant portion of WoW's problem is still that the assholes have more control over what a raid costs you than you do, and furthermore, after the raid is done you are forced to compete with them for loot.

THis does sound awesome. Goddamn it WuA, I was much happier not   knowing a system like exists or has existed. Usually I am pretty happy with WoW (kinda like that Churchill quote about Democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the rest), but that sounds fuckin ballin'.

Actually my favorite dungeon crawl experiences was in a game that sucked-DDO. My friends and I would all play healer hybrids, so it was our own responsibility to heal ourselves, and mobs in the dungeons we did weren't calculated to tear the shit out of anyone who didn't bring a dedicated healer (no we didn't play on hard mode). We had the most fun in the world all just dpsing and competing to see who could get the most kills. In hindsight the system was flawed as hell, but it was fun at that time.

After that we moved onto WoW, and we we introduced to the tank, healer, dps system.

As I've said before, I'm not totally disatisfied with the holy trinity, and kill ten rats over here, now kill ten foozles over there, now run Howling Caverns twice, system. But damn that Doom Gaunlet sounds fun.

They've done a lot of interesting stuff that gets overlooked because it's bolted onto a hundred-year-old game. But it's the only MMO I can think of by a major company that has been trying to do interesting PVE in a non-diku system.

The lesson of UO was that the trade-off for giving players freedom is not worth the number of subs you lose from players abusing that freedom. And that a controlled, directed experience - EQ - will attract a bigger audience anyway.

It's all quest-driven content. It just depends who sets the quest objectives (game vs player) and how they are delivered (where single player RPGs tend to have the same kinds of quests but they are better delivered).

I have a feeling that The Sims (1/2/3, not online) attracts more players than World of Warcraft, but am too lazy to research boxes sold.  Granted, they're not directly comparable, and TSO was a flop.  However I'd imagine that the market is there if a developer can deliver the right game with the right payment model.

The Sims is a dress-up/ house simulator whose primary attraction is customizing a Sim family, furnishing their house and either fucking up their lives or pushing them to the pinnacle of a career path.  While using cheat codes for tons of money to do so.   Also, player-supplied content is huge.   

Neither of the last two were available in TSO, and other players were able to fuck up the first one far too easily.   Plus, you were limited to one Sim where the SP attraction is controlling not just the family but the whole damn neighborhood.

If you want to even remotely come close to the SP numbers you'd have to keep people from fucking with your players and provide the instant gratification of cheat codes.  So, RMT, with some method of ignore causing other players to not be able to affect you at all, ever.

Part of the problem you seem to be having is the MMO tradition of making player owned/controlled stuff akin to staking out a sign that reads "Fuck me here!" with an arrow pointed to the appropriate orifice.  The obvious solution for a Sims-type game is some form of karma (a list of shit destroyed / messes made in dollar value to fix) with a "call cops / sue for damages" option that redresses the imbalance where appropriate (note: aggregate shit like messes and broken appliances, make the subsequent repair/cleaning call a flat fee).

Cheat codes aren't needed if the gameplay required to get nice things is trivial.  Instancing the housing areas would solve a number of the apparent problems of handing out low-cost housing to players, after which point it's pretty much a matter of finding what kind of gameplay you want to reward with the ability to build or rebuild bigger and grander houses, and to what extent you want to encourage communal/guild type living quarters.

For example: you could tie housing to Achievement/Tome of Knowledge unlocks, with the unlocked items being free.  Similarly, you could use an aggregate point value from Achievements to determine how big a player can build, with no additional costs (free housing OMGWTF?).  Same thing for guilds, with guild achievements/levels determining the available resources.

1) Sims had a karma system and it backfired. Problem players formed groups to shake-down other players for Simoleons. If you didn't pay up they and their affiliated groups would downrank your karma/ plot, ruining gameplay for many.

2) People want the easy way out, regardless of how easy anything is to attain short of handing it out.  You can earn 200g a day per character in WOW in less than an hour, but folks still buy gold.  So unless you're going to simply remove all gameplay, plenty of folks will still go around and RMT what they want.  May as well let the company make that money via RMT.   In your example, gold farming becomes character farming, selling pre-ranked characters to players who simply want to .

Sims Online missed the entire goddamn point of the Sims. If I'm playing the Sims, the last thing I want to do is have someone else playing with me!

Which proves that player-controlled karma is a bad idea, not that tracking who dumps shit on the floor and penalizing them §15 divided by the number of people who dumped shit so that the owner can phone a maid is a bad idea.

The other point is inconsequential, because I really don't have an axe to grind against authorized RMT for fluff items, particularly if the results can be reproduced without RMT in the hypothetical game.

The joke makes itself!

I think this is a problem with a lot of MMOs actually.  The genre is "hot" since blizzard has made a bazillion dollars on WoW, but frankly, not every game idea is best made into an MMO, and especially not a WoW Clone MMO.

There are a lot of MMOs right now that have perfectly good gameplay, decent stories, and even a decent game world, but they would be totally more enjoyable as an out of box single player game, or maybe even as a co-op game.   But put the MMO title on it, charge me a monthly fee, and I start wanting something more worthy of a virtual world, and the games don't deliver in that respect.

If Borderlands were an MMO I'd be screaming bloody murder about the fact that it railroads me through the content, and that the classes aren't balanced.   As a co-op game, I'm having fun finding outrageous loot and blowing the crap out of bad guys.

Yeah, I definitely agree that some games would be better as just co-op or even single player instead of as an MMO. I'm sort of WTF at Torchlight apparently being an MMO one day, for example.

Regardless, I'm done with MMOs other than LOTRO (lifetime sub) for a very good while.  I don't mind quest driven content, but they are all exactly the fucking same.  To a tee. 

Good video on the silliness of sidequests (http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1923420)

The problem with sidequests is that they are "side" quests.  I think the main story arcs that end up driving a lot of RPGs aren't that good, are cliche, or just don't add that much to the experience to be honest.  They aren't always terrible, but I can't help myself but think "what if the developers let me live in this world they created on MY terms instead of theirs?"

Most people don't appear creative enough to make their own fun.  This seems to be the reason why MMO's have mutated from worlds to amusement park rides.  That and it's a hell of a lot easier to keep the douchebags under check when they don't have tools at their disposal to ruin the gameplay experience of others. 

People have the creativity. It's that their passion gets shot to hell when they realize the amount of actual investment it takes to make a fully playable end-to-end game, much less an MMO. The epiphany people get is when they realize most of game development is the grindy development part, not the shiny design part.


No. Draegen nailed it in his response, but I meant what I said. I did my time and my life has changed so I no longer can. It's not the people. That part is easy if you're not an asshat nor have high expectations of suddenly falling in with a well-coordinated group of altruists. The hard part is the time against the reward, balanced against having to care enough. I don't anymore. This is not an indictment against Raiding. It's more an insight of why raiding doesn't cast a wide net no matter how its tweaked.

I really want to believe you.  You're usually pretty spot on about these things.  With the popularity of WoW it almost seems like ding-gratz and loot are more of an incentive than enjoyable gameplay.  It's very much a lottery mentality in these games. 

I think what I'm observing is a change in core gameplay as you attempt to target a broader audience.  It's like going from a story-driven indie film to a mass market action flick.  They're both good for different reasons.  The McDonald's analogy also applies.  I guess I'm wanting to go back to more niche market games.  Sadly, I think those days are over. 

I'm sorta at that point myself. I think the big problem is that we want a niche game but one done with a big mass market budget because we don't have the patience for whatever kludginess usually comes along with "niche" :-)

You know an awful lot of people are willing to sit in front of slot machines and just pull the handle for hours on end. Even virtual ones that don't pay real coin.

SB and WAR basically fall in the same category in my head.  Some genuinely interesting ideas but a complete lack of foresight to understand how these ideas would play out.  One common trait between the two is that both games are designed to function under ideal populations.  Which is hopelessly naive for PvP games where it is very unlikely populations will ever be ideal.   Even on the off-chance the population where ideal, the nature flow of battle would push them off kilter.

So the design of these games needs stop pretending these imbalanced situations don't happen, instead assume that they are normal. The game should be 100% playable in lopsided scenarios:  Uberguild owns 100% landscape.  One team outnumbers the other team by 100 to 10. One team is more hardcore players than everyone else.  These scenarios needed to be beta tested.   Deliberately and severely imbalance teams on your beta servers.  Force entire teams to be PvP- to see happens when carebears play your game.  

This stuff will happen.  Wishful thinking isn't going keep your game from tanking and your staff from being slashed.

And we all said amen. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Sometimes I wonder if developers know how to make good solid games, but they purposefully go down the fail trail for some weird reason. Bite-sized chunks, simple yet entertaining graphics, soloability, gamey versus worldy, spoon-feeding content...those were all things players have been asking for before WoW. Developers seemed to invent reasons not to do those things, as though they were afraid of unleashing some juggernaut. But someone did.

It all has to do with money.  The people with the money think you have to have grind to make it work.  If you can never achieve end-game then you don't need an end-game.

They should know that even a horse knows the difference between a real carrot and a fake one. 

Speaking of carrots, I'm convinced that Blizzard utilzed or utilizes psychological principles in its design.  I wouldn't be surprised if they actually had behavioral psychologists on staff.  If I was going to blow $100 mil to develop a game I can guarantee you that I would.

I think the only thing that Blizzard does differently from most other companies is that if several months and millions of dollars of work is done on a milestone and the internal testers say "This sucks and isn't fun" they actually listen to them, and have the balls to shitcan or heavily modify work with sunk costs. This isn't to say that Blizz doesn't make mistakes (original honor system, vehicles, etc) but they've avoided the truly game-killing mistakes that other MMO's have done. We'll probably never know but I would love to find out how many iterations the WoW combat engine went through before beta.

Yeah. That's it.

It has cascading benefits as well. People know this and they know if something comes out, it won't be warhammer or conan.

Yeah. What other company would have just blown up the Starcraft: Ghost project entirely when it was clear the game just wasn't fun?

How many other companies can afford to abandon a project that they've sunk millions into?

Too many to count is my guess. Someone spent a LOT of fucking time making sure player input and character output were virtually in perfect sync. I have yet to play another MMO that had that smoothness.

That's the point of understanding sunk costs: the money is already spent whatever it is that you do next. If you've blown $1 billion making new fighter jets and they don't work right, blowing another $1 billion because you already spent a billion is more painful than letting it go when you should have. Same for a lot of MMOs: what producers need to realize is that you can't afford to continue a project you've sunk millions into if it's unsalvageably bad, not the other way around. That's why Blizzard is money hats and Mythic is about to go bye-bye.

This is the difference between design and development. Lots of companies think they're being clever by combining both. And the reason they do that is because they've convinced themselves their fundamental design concept is solid, so all they really need to do is build against it. This is a problem in lots of industries which have as much need for R&D as they do for marketing.

Blizzard leaves a lot of time for iteration. Most others don't. But then, most others don't show up to a new project with a warchest full of prior successes. Their methodology is in part permissable because they're right, they're right at a scale of success almost nobody else can touch at that time.

So this is something else one really can't compare with Blizzard.

What if you're a startup and only have one game? What if the development money runs out? Nobody wants to be the company that just gave up.

And that's exactly the reason most stuff launches, good or bad. Because it needs to. Once you're in the hole that deep, you might as well see it through to at least have the sense of accomplishment.

As a counter-argument, SOE in particular have shown several times that, once you have sunk those costs into a project, you can sometimes at least give yourself a moderate cash cow since MMOs aren't all that expensive to run (badly) in maintenance mode for even very moderate subscriber bases.

That's not so much a counterargument as one that supports the notion of a sliding scale to "good enough". You can always get a thousand people to buy something. The questions are whether that can offset your costs and can you keep them?

Besides, SOE themselves haven't themselves launched most of the mediiocre MMOs in their catalog as much as enabled them to get launched by providing key support at a critical juncture. And further, their model isn't nearly as vertical per title as companies with only one or two MMOs, given the economies of scale they've achieved with their infrastructure.

Alternatively: cancelling that "not quite there" title means firing 40 people. In a company of under 100. The first 30 go the second you cancel the project.

Plus there is also the issue is that sometimes an 'almost there' title only requires a few extra bits of development to come through - at crunch time - to suddenly arrive. Valve has said that despite years worth of development, TF2 only became fun (to their standards) in the last few months of development. Is WAR "unsalvageably bad"? No, but it is going to take more money and time than EA will want to invest in it to make it salvageably good, along with good lead designer.

Blizzard can, at this point, afford to do whatever they want. They aren't a business model that any other development studio (maybe Valve...) can duplicate.

There aren't a lot of people running around who when SC2 is mentioned scream "I will never ever buy a product from those bastards at Blizzard again."

But if SOE announced EQ3 today, I doubt if you'd make it through the first page on most gaming boards without seeing someone who is still pissed off about SWG or even EQ1 enough to want to boycott the company.

Instead we get "WoW is so boring I only played it for 5 years and it sucked and Blizzard sucks".

Finding retarded reasons to dislike something is the tao of the internet.