f13.net

The lesson for today is: Doesn't matter if you can keep servers up or not, people will still pay and pay happily.

 >< (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=4459.0) You've been talking to schild too much.

Good for them, even if I haven't logged in for a solid week due to Resident Evil 4 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory kicking far too much ass.

Apparently, they are using "regular basis" to mean "every 4 months or so", at best.

What a crock.

So what are the lessons other devs should be taking away from WoW?

1) Grinds suck?
2) Proprietary IP rocks?
3) "teh b3st gfx evar" aren't needed?

4) PvP isn't necessarily the mother of all evil?

Casual gamers have disposable cash too?

Xilren

It's a regular basis.  Just because it doesn't meet some hardcore mandate of "OMG GIMME NEW CONTANT EVRY 1 MO OR I WALK!" doesn't mean it's not regular.   4 mil other people aren't assed about it.

And its actually every couple months tops, and most servers are up most of the time, but god forbid actual facts get in the way of the bitching.

WoW's a good game.  Servers went down, but most days they were up and things were fine (like, 97% of the time my server was up).

I don't know, but at 41 I just completely lost interest, gave away all my gold, and quit.  <shrug>  Maybe it was the money farming for mounts that did it.

I'd have to disagree with this. There are plenty of new ideas out there, but they don't get a chance because are scared to try something they're not intimately familiar with.

Also, I wouldn't say the world of Warcraft (no pun intended) is anything more than lackluster.

Aren't most games that reach a certain level of market penetration pretty much lackluster? I mean, lowest common denominator seems to rule the roost when it comes to PC games.

Deer Hunter, anyone?

Why would you lay such a monumental shit on your own boards, honestly?

I think you're somewhat off base here.  It's that theses games are lackluster (that's a perception thing, if you think WoW's lack luster, good luck in this genre), it's that they're aiming for a broad audience to which similar style games have not reached before.  And they hit it.  Deer Hunter absolutely struck gold with Joe Walmart and WoW managed to draw in a really wide ranging gamer base.  Hell, the most telling thing would be that two of the most recognizable web comic sites are STILL talking about the game.

I could list all WoW's done right in this matter but it's pointless.  It'd all point to the same conclusion: WoW has the greatest name recognition (both in license and company), appeals to widest range of gamers imaginable, and is the most accessable. Add that up and you've just got a subscription grabbing machine when combined with their overal level of quality in many different facets of the game. 

Note: This is not defending Deer Hunter. I've got no clue how big of a steaming pile that game is or isn't.  While Deer Hunter aimed squarely for the lcd, I don't consider that the case with WoW.  I'm sure it's debatable though, or this site wouldn't exist.

This is where Cameron goes nuts. (the quote may be off, I apologize ahead of time)

IS THAT TYPE OF POST REALLY FUCKING NECESSARY?

Just for that I'm going back to scary James Van Der Beek.

I laughed, I cried. 5 stars.

easiliest is a great word. I wonder if you can have a raging case of easiliest.

Deer Hunter is easily explained if you're not an elitist fucknut who thinks they're better than everyone else.  Of course that explains why 9/10 of the internet doesn't get it, because the internet is just one big e-peen contest when it's not about porn.

There's a HUGE segment of the population that enjoys hunting.  However, you can only do it for a number of weeks out of the year.  Turn a popular "sport" into a video game, and voila, moneyhats. Or did the whole Madden thing escape you all, too?

I've played the game before...it sucks. Not only is it nothing like actual hunting, the aiming blows ass.

Lets not even get into the production values.

Ok, I know I'm guilty of stupid replies, but can we all cut down on this type of stuff? Rasix posted a good follow-up to an over-arching generalization I made and to see something like this as the first reply is sad.

It's like hunting in as much as the many, for example, WWII shooters are like "being in the actual war". Which is to say: Not much. If that's the main reason why you hate the Deer Hunter series, then you ought to criticize other games as well. None of them accurately simulate what they're trying to do. It's just the general idea that appeals to people...Be it SWAT, Medal of Honor, or a game where you crawl around in the grass and shoot deer. That was the only point why it got a mentioned in the first place. Not whether it was an accurate hunting game or not. 

Besides, what the hell does some reclusive kid from "New Joysey" know about hunting?  :-D

[edit] Supposedly, the series has crawled out of it's sub-mediocre state and isn't half bad (http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/922139.asp?q=deer%20hunter) these days. Maybe they fixed the "aiming"?

Hi, I also use to live in California, my father is/was a hunter, and I've been hunting before (as much as I loathe to admit it).

Thanks for stopping by, but please take your gross assumptions with you.

Also, I don't posses a "Joysey" accent, kthx.

Hi. It was a joke.

Sorry, your bad...You didn't color-code you text correctly, according to the generally accepted board standards.

My bad it is then. But Green doesn't have quite the same effect it should, don't you think? It's kind of pandering to the sandy vagina inherent in all of us. Sarcasm should provoke...Just a little bit.  :wink:

[edit] My apology though.

Bah, I just thought it was a funny word and didn't want it to be lost.  I could've said that in the initial post, but that wouldn't have been nearly as funny as just leaving it there.

But fine, I'll be good.

Sorry if you were offended, Rasix.  Didn't mean anything by it- we all make those sorts of mistakes and they're just funny to catch.

Sincerity rules.

WoW is a pretty good game, for the current implementation of mmogs (ie: EQ). Crushed by the "endgame" crap, but for me the real killer is the EQ-ish gameplay. Bring back early UO, bitches. I'll be waiting, because I have no interest in this other crap.

I'd like to thank the mmog industry in general for sucking so badly, it's really helping me find time to practice guitar!

I think WOW's success is half the hype of being a Blizzard game which gave them a lot of momentum and half that they have produced a game that has removed almost all the demotivators that are common to MMPORPGs. It's not that it's really all that good at game as much as it never makes you scream in rage and frustration. Nor for the most part does the company. About the only two issues I see are the servers are down more than average (otoh there's a lot more and they are very crowded) and the queue for the battlegrounds--which would be and probably will be solved by giving the horde an attractive evil elf race in the first expansion.

I think WOW is one of the least exciting games I've ever played, but I've never once felt so frustrated or angry at the game that I didn't want to play. And I think especially for casual gamers, getting rid of all the reasons not to play has turned out to be a lot better commercial decision than giving people reason to play.

I like WoW.  I like its designers didn't approach is as a "social experiment" (ie. SWG).  I like that I can play casually and feel rewarded/entertained.  I don't aim to "finish" a game quickly, or eat my desert in one mouthful.  Clearly, there are many more lame-o's like me with $.  

It's not a deep game, but it's a coherent, complete (for itself) and consistent game, who's only major flaws seem to be 1) network or login lag, 2) slow content additions.  1) is from unexpected popularity and 2) is probably from it still having been out for less than a year.  Both are solvable.  Having to redo your entire combat system like SWG, however, is not solvable.  So WoW will be around I predict for a loooong time, longer than probably EQ# overall.

Edit:

I think you've nailed it Sir.

Slap the right brand name on a mediocre game that panders to the lowest common demoninator = profit.

WoW is too linear, too easy, has pathetic pvp, has an even worse endgame, and the stylized graphics make me stabby.  One million subs is what CoH deserves for taking risks and making a fun game.  WoW, not so much. 

Why does it piss me off so much to see this title do well?  I'm not sure I can even articulate it.  I just don't like the direction things are going.   

I'm not sure about Deer Hunter, but Cabela's Big Game Hunter is awesome.

You can even play multiplayer. You ride around on four wheelers/pickup trucks/snow mobiles out into the woods and setup shop. Whoever gets the most/biggest wins.

ANYWAYS...

edit: haha, Nebu you're talking about wow being too linear and easy, with lousy pvp and a shitty endgame?

THEN YOU PRAISE COH, how is that fucking possible? CoH is the same exact shit, on even simpler terms.

I was attempting to illustrate that if someone should be rewarded for their efforts, I'd prefer it was the group that actually made an attempt at innovating.   You're absolutely right about the rest.   

Personally, I just don't get all the love for CoH and the resultant comparisons to WoW. I played CoH for three months - character design was the best ever done and combat was fun. Beyond that - nothing else to do beyond a mindnumbing grind. WoW's far from perfect, but it's kept my interest much longer than CoH just because there are so many more options of what to do and how to play. Could they add more options and improve things? Of course, but as is, its still a pretty damn good game.

I am sick and tired of level based games.  I wish that one would come out that was skill based, a la Ultima Online (before the equipment expansion).  I understand there is a need to generate money in these games, but is there not a smart enough company to go a different route?  

One thing that I hate about level based is it can be hard to play with friends, even with the ability to equalize levels (such as with a mentoring system).  I tried to get a couple friends to play EQ2, and they do not want to because I am ahead in levels.  And I understand their reasonings.  At least with skill based gaming you can still play together in a social enviorn; I remember the days of UO when we would get together and do a dungeon crawl, even with weaker friends.  I dunno, just the entire level thing seems flawed unless you are a powergamer or unless you and your buddies all purposely level together. 



edit. Added more stuffs.

4a) PVP can be tacked on at the last minute?

I lasted about the same amount of time in both games.  I praise CoH for actually trying to bring something new to mmog's.  When playing CoH the fun starts at level 1.  Hell, you can make an entire session running around and generating characters.  On top of it all, CoH did a great job of making you feel like a superhero.

Perhaps it's that there are so many fantasy-based games out there that WoW really seemed too much like same_shit_new_shiny.  Given their budget and the brainpower behind the project, my expectations were well beyond what was delivered.  That may have tainted my perception.  It's alot like the disappointment we all felt in the SWG beta. Reviewing Blizzard's prior work, I realize that my expectations were unrealistic.

And takes a break at 10.

If you want to praise CoH, I might as well praise MxO for the switchable skill system and cinematic combat - practically everything else is
"borrowed" from CoH, except it's not as balanced.

If CoH had quests and items as interesting as WoW, it would have mitigated the grind somewhat. As it was, there was a finite number of times I could run through the same office building map to kill the foozles AGAIN. WoW got grindy in the late 40s for me, which is about twice as long as it took for CoH.

CoH has added a greater variety of maps since release. I was quite impressed with some of them a few months ago when I played for a week or so.

Cheddar makes good points.

This has really got me thinking; are there any alternatives to the current level up mechanic?  Irth online seems to be going the skill based route, but from all reports it is a poor game with subpar performance (I know, I know, Beta).  I no longer consider Ultima Online skill based, it went the item route a couple expansions ago.  Wish was cancelled.  Can anyone name some other games based on player "skills,"  or name any others that are in the works?

Google for Darkfall and Dark and Light. They do seem awful a lot like next generation SB in every aspect, so it might not turn out that great in the end.

Bingo. Nail on head. It wasn't a glass of exquisite champagne, but after drinking stale sparkling grape juice for so many years, no one really noticed that it wasn't a $500 bottle of primo bubbly either.

Superficial.

I don't mind level-based games all that much, provided they put in a way for people of different levels to play together.  CoH did this with sidekicking/exemplaring, which I think is an outstanding solution to the problem.

I got bored with WoW (first on a pve horde rogue at 53, next as a pvp alliance hunter at 48) to the point of not wanting to slog through the remaining levels so that I could enjoy catassing raids as endgame - no thanks.  Quit before the battlegrounds were put in.

It's not the levels so much, it's what to do during the levels.  CoH has no endgame to speak of, and Cryptic has added content.  Still, my 32ish blaster is boring to play most of the time.  Too bad they didn't put in that cool 40-50 content in the 30-40 range and stop at 40.

The levels create segregation, no matter how well you add mechanics such as mentoring and whatnot.  High levels get used to their powers and have to give some of it up to play with low level friends, along with skipping out on their own missions.  Lower levels do not have the range of abilities higher levels do, and in most games cannot access all the areas a higher level can.  It is more of a band aid then a solution.  I mean it was implemented in an outstanding manner, and works VERY well for COH.  But it is still a level based game, and those just "feel" different.

GRAPE DRINK, BITCH! GRAPE DRINK!

/chappelle

On his new live at the Fillmore dvd, he had a great joke about the black kid in the sunny D commercials always going for the purple stuff.

I don't understand this need for items. In CoH, it would have made no sense for there to be a true inventory system, anyway.

An item-based economy is just a pai in the ass most of the time.

Doesn't Austerina have two giant overly powerful guns in the CoC Campaign? You damn well do understand the love of loot, you just don't want to admit it.

She has one gun, thanks.

And comparing PnP to an MMO is a horrible comparison. The item systems in MMOs are just overly random, and in the end, pointless.

You don't get the gobs and gobs of loot in a PnP game that you do in an MMO.

There's something to be said about gobs and gobs of loot and a decent amount of good loot. Diablo 2 Loot System >>>>> WoW.

What are you takling about? It's the same damn loot system.

Give loot random stats, of power proportional to the difficulty of the mob which dropped it.

Give loot some random name related to the prime stats on the loot; IE "Owl" loot generally means it has intelligence on it, etc.

Diablo's loot system was fun and enjoyable.

WoW's loot system is smallminded and targeted.

In Diablo (1 and 2) there's a ton of good weapons that will get the hardest shit done efficiently. In WoW, everyone's aiming after the same 15-30 items. Blech.

Loot is good for something to fiddle around with between dings.  Which is one the reasons why people don't like CoH, there is nothing to min/max between levels. 

Pretty much. It would have been nice to have a few more ways to customize a character other than his appearance and when they level up, and loot allows that.

Exactly. Getting new shinys between the level ups and new abilities keeps things a lot more interesting. In CoH, you're just killing mob after mob with the only goal in sight being those next powers every other level, and the more you progress the further away that carrot gets between bites. Getting an enhancement from a mob just doesn't compare to real, satisfying loot. Sweet, sweet loot ... and always that chance that that next mob could drop the Big One, that Epic Purple. Heck it's the appeal of gambling added to gaming, every mob is a lotto ticket ... CoH just really suffers for lack of this mechanic.

I'm sure a lot of people just don't like WoW .. no big deal ... but the " I'm Too Good For This Kind of Mass Market Product" attitude is pretty stale. Because of course no successful game actually deserves that success, right? Anything with that wide an appeal .. well ... ITS THE MCDONALDS OF MMORPGS, RIGHT? YOU WOULDN"T BE CAUGHT DEAD AT A FUCKING MCDONALDS, SOMEONE MIGHT SEE YOU MINGLING WITH THE COMMONERS!!

 :-D

OTOH, I am reasonably sure that there aren't little remnants of WoW lodged deep in my colon. I am not so sure about McDonald's.

I agree with what other people have said: WoW is never awful or drives you crazy, which is in itself an accomplishment.

However, I would rather play a game with higher highs and lower lows. When the negatives build up too much, I'll stop. My problem with WoW is that I have no compulsion to play. There is no disincentive, but there is no real incentive either.

I compare that to a game like AO. I played AO free for a week or so and it was genuinely enjoyable. FFXI was enjoyable until it just got too slow, especially with all the grouping problems. (AKA, wait around forever for a White Mage) But both of those games had big plusses that WoW lacks.

FFXI had great art and animation, the overall world was very well realized, and it has a lot of "oh cool!" moments. (Like the first time you see an elemental just ominously floating there looking scary)

AO had incredible character customization. Just levelling up in the newbie junkyward area I probably went through 3 or 4 totally different looks. And I was *very* impressed when I went outside the town and saw a guild grouping up - about 50 different players all of which looked really different. Some guys in huge spiky armor, some in long robes, color coordination everywhere, etc.

I didn't have any reason to stop playing WoW other than that I just didn't feel like playing it. Nothing reached out and grabbed me.

I didn't like repetitive missions.  If I gave a fuck about collecting items, an economy, or min/maxing I'd still be playing FFXI.  Making shiny shit drop from mobs does fuck all to improve gameplay for me, and it certainly doesn't fit in a superhero game.  Trying to get all the best weapons and shit is just one more grind added on to the game, especially if it has PVP in it.  Right now CoH just has the arenas, but should I ever go back once CoV comes out and real PVP is added, the last thing I'm going to want is have to grind through levels and try to get whatever items put me on a close-to-level playing field with the catasses.

Made red and big for truth.

I don't see it as that. I see more people going with the "Too much Everquest, too little Diablo."

As much as I like Diablo, it's just runnng around whacking guys for random loot.  Maybe to you, adding that to an MMO is like getting chocolate in your peanut butter or something, but I'd just rather wait for someone to make Diablo III or something close to it (not Champions of Norrath).  Loot in PnP games is fun because you don't constantly have other people around decked out in similar or better gear.  Loot in MMO's just lead to fashion shows and grinding for gear.

Goddamnit, my reply got eaten. Anyway, City of Heroes is a fashion show without loot.

When were MMOGs not fashion shows anyway? The first thing most people do when they see a high level person is inspect them. I mean really, saying avatars are more than condensed vanity is missing the point. These games we're discussing aren't about skill. They're about being social (in some backasswards way) and putting yourself on parade.

I hardly ever inspect anyone, I just don't care what they're wearing and I've never "put myself on parade" in an online game. Maybe the way I'm playing is wrong.

At least in CoH though, how good your characters look is determined by how well you designed them rather than by how much time you invested in grinding loot, or how lucky you were in drops.

And yeah, most MMOs right now are fashion shows (and don't get me wrong, I don't think WoW is any better in that respect than any other MMO), but I was under the impression that you wanted to get out of the first generation of MMOs at some point rather than just accept them for what they are.  Loot grinding is just of the things that keeps these games more about who's got the most free time, rather than skill.

I don't know. I grinded for loot in Soul Caliber 2.

AND IT WAS WONDERFUL.

All I care about is unlocking characters, I don't give much care to what outfits they wear.

That's what I said until I started playing DOA2 again. Also, unlocking outfits in games like God of War and RE4 is pretty damned fun. That said, MMOGs suck really due to the fact that all the games I've mentioned are completely 100% skill based. Well, RE4 is about 90% skill based while most MMOGs actually take less skill than opening a garage door manually.

Ohh boy, we've come to MMORPGs take no skill now?  We've resorted to that.  Mmm k. 

Time to use an old standby: I disagree with what you said. 

I inspect people with cool looking shields. I like shields for some reason.

Sure, MMOs currently use skills....but it's Which skills that become annoying. Lets not even get into the fact that many of the "high end" players resort to 3rd party mods to make things easier.

You know, I've always wanted a chance to say this. Memorizing when to hit things during a slow process and memorizing a list of skills and what they do and where they are on a hotbar isn't a skill. IT'S A NECESSITY FOR LIVING. Even though really, your brain isn't saying "Dark Fury is connected to F1" it's saying, "oooooh blue shiny shadow things fly out from my sword by hitting this button" and then it becomes muscle memory.

Very true. They really don't appeal to my button mashing, weened-on-Nintendo sensibilities....But yet, I still play them. I'm not sure why that is. Exploration maybe (something single player games don't offer in the same way)?

[edit] I'll just say that my version of button mashing is different than what Schild just said. I'm speaking in the Street Fighter/Shoryuken sense, or Prince of Persia bunny hopping puzzle sense. Not in the mmo hotkey sense.

[edit] I will say however that the best mmog's offer in terms of skill is about cooperation and teamwork. The puzzle doesn't get interesting until more than one person comes into the mix. That's all fine and good -- It's a massive multiplayer game. My problem is that individual dynamics are completely braindead. Why does it have to be either/or? It should be fun on an individual level, as well as a teamwork level.

Then what is skill? A pvp duel in UO or WoW isn't much different than Ryu v. Spiderman in an arcade.  Take two people with access to the same resources, a different set of skills available (or moves), and the better person is going to win a majority of the time. 

I killed thousands of people in UO and died maybe a handful of times (during the dread lord days). A good 50% of those encounters were against people with knowledge of the same exploits, the same or often better stats, and probably a better PC and connection.  I have at best, marginal handeye coordination and reaction times.  I can say I was good at that game and had "skill" (I'd honestly say I've never been good at a mmorpg since). Skill is just not circle strafing and headshotting someone with a desert eagle.   I still knew who my betters were and I didn't win duels against them. 

Being around the top end of folks, day in and day out, you learn some things. Some people are better at these games and it's just not a manner of them being first to 60 or mapping their keys better than everyone else.  Christ, there's people I knew in AC2 that could pull of stuff that just made you scratch your head.

Really, it's not even an argument when you're taking into consideration PVP. PVE, yes, most idiots can be good enough at PVE because at a point you're going to hit a wall at just how effective you can be given the circumstances.  It's still rather easy to tell the cream for the crap.  Saying this stuff takes no skill just automatically discounts a lot of amazing players I've come across. 

And really... play in the Tomb of Primeval Kings a few times in Guild Wars and tell me there's no skill in that.

That takes more group skill, and less individual skill.

Which is where I'll give mmog's credit. They just need to be as dynamic on an individual level (which would in turn make group play even more interesting). Some games have a class/build or two that brings out the fun potential, but at their core, it's all a bunch of bullshit (yeah, that's my technical description).

[edit] And this is just a complaint about character/player abilities and combat. I didn't even mention level design. That would be a whole thread in and of itself.

Oh hey now...

 - meg

Dark and Light has classes.  I do not like classes.  Darkfall seems more open ended.  Of course what they are telling us and what the reality is are two different things.  I guess we will see what happens.

I personally don't want to go to McDonalds because the food sucks.  That's an option, right?  Translate that to WoW and you'll understand.  Though I must admit that 5 minutes of the general chat channel at the release of WoW was very different than anything I had experienced in UO, EQ, or any MUD I had ever played.

Any interaction with the general population in WoW makes me stabby.

Darkfall's very much open ended. That much is true.

It is anything and everything.....Because it doesn't exist.

If you are going to quote me, at least finish reading the rest of the post.  I said the same thing.

I didn't realize you were saying that since you finished it with the slightly hopeful "We'll see what happens". It sounded like you were expecting a game still (albeit a shitty one).

Well, my meaning was more along the lines of WoW not equating to McDonalds. That just because a game is successful and has a fairly wide appeal, that doesn't mean it lacks quality. WoW is in fact the opposite of the lifeless, assembly line generic product of something like McDonald's - it is vibrant, it has a style all its own, and it was clearly made with a love of the material. The McDonalds choice was EQ2 - which has largely been rejected.

I see it very differently.  I see WoW as a marketing success but a huge step backward for the genre.  To me, WoW is McDonalds; geared to the mainstream and mass appeal.  I prefer to get my burger from a specialty place (i.e. niche).  I want more Mom & Pop places (puzzle pirates, ATitD, etc.) and fewer McDonalds (WoW).  As for EQ2, I think it's a large-scale niche product.  It caters to EQ folks while WoW caters to a much larger audience.  WoW targets not only the Blizzard fanbase, but also targets those new to the mmog genre.   If forced to draw a similar comparison, I'd compare EQ2 to Wendy's. A solid enough game that caters to a smaller crowd. 

On a side note, I personally found the environments in EQ2 much more immersive than anything in WoW.  I guess the stylized graphics of WoW just never grabbed me. Personal taste I guess.

What it comes down to for me is I enjoy WoW. I have fun playing it. Thats all that matters to me.

Well put.  It's a game.  Fun is all that should matter.

Certainly, of course no game out there can please everyone. I do think many of the complaints against WoW are from folks that are just tired of this style of game, and are ready for the genre to branch out in new ways. A valid point of course, but irrelevant for all the gamers who aren't tired of that kind of MMORPG - not necessarily just people brand new to the genre, but players who like the familiarity of those tried and true game mechanics.

Same for other genres too. I'm sure there were Quake and Unreal Tournament fans that loved those games back in the day and are just as excited for the upcoming games in the series, and people that have exhausted any enjoyment they're going to get from running around and shooting things repeatedly.

I like WoW because it proved Jessical Mulligan was right: just give me a fun game.  All the introspective analysis and neverending BS we spewed for years on this forum and its predecessors, all the circle-jerking fluff that got passed around MUD-DEV means nothing.  Blizzard swept all that shit away: those ideas and people (unless they are willing to adapt rather radically to the new world) are now just plain irrelevant.  Thank God for that.  Just give me a fun game.

Well said.

/applaud EG

I'm of two minds about this.  I agree with you from the standpoint that in the end, a fun game is all that matters and over the years on these and other boards I realized that I didnt really want a vibrant, massive virtual world sim anymore simply b/c they were too problematic.  WoW is just a larger step towards "EQ done right", much as DAoC was also a step forward, albeit a smaller one.  Take as just a fun game with those expectations, it succeeds quite well and the market responded.

BUT, that doesn't mean I don't also want to see something NEW in the orpg space that pushes the boundries.  For all it's polish and popularity, WoW just didn't do much that was actually different from it's predecessors.  I think that's the reason some many of us here keep grumbing and bitching, yet we;ll dive into any online gaming beta like a drug addict looking for a fix.  We've all seen and experienced the fun these game offers, and more importantly, our imaginations have also shown us the potential fun that could be had extrapolating from our experiences.  How many times have you said to yourself "man, this is OK, but it would be great if it had X".

So while I too don't get the hate of WoW, it's certainly possible to like WoW and still want something more.  Ironically enough, I intentionally didn't attempt to beta WoW b/c it didn't sound all that appealing (been there/done that syndrome).  But, postive word of mouth made me try it, and I liked it; hell even my 5 and 9 year old boys played and like it.  They eventually got bored with it, as did I.  And I'm sure I'l also try the "next best thing" whatever that turns out to be, but I'd ALSO like something a little deeper/more complex...

Xilren

Aspects of WoW are very assembly line, especially the loot. Just the naming of loot items is ridiculously generic. Sword of the Whale, Sword of the Monkey, Sword of the Flea, Sword of the Baboon...yeah we get that each animal corresponds to a different basic stat already.

I've always said there are two aspects to creating a good game: adding good parts and eliminating bad ones. The thing is, just doing the second part can net you a pretty good game overall. If you eliminate all the bad, what's left is decent, if uninspired.

Most games could benifit a lot lot more from people just playing, saying "this isn't so fun" and then changing it. What works on paper, in your head and in mockups may not end up working at all in the game.

For example, as I've said before, FFXI could be a great game if they eliminated some of the bad. There is a short list of things they could change that would improve the game dramatically:

Don't balance the game such that White Mages are required in groups.
Spread out the effective levels of an XP party and rebalance classes such that the difference between OK groups and really great groups isn't as large.
Make everything faster. (Travel, levelling, searching our items, etc)

Of course, there are tons of smaller things they could do, but my guess is that just the changes above would eliminate many many complaints that come directly or indirectly from the problems those changes would address.
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Just removing the bad parts of a game is pretty easy. The hard part is adding in the good parts so that you don't end up with a game that is polished but bland. But just one or two good ideas can go a long way there.

One way to look at it is the number of good things in a game limit the high end the game can achieve, but the number of bad things limit the low end. I personally think WoW has a low limit on it's high end achievement, because nothing there really impresses me. But it also has a very low limit on it's low end.

Compare that to a game like AO. The ceiling there is a lot higher IMO. Of course, reaching the ceiling is another matter.
---
Most games released (not just MMORPGs) have a number of large things obviously wrong with them. Avoiding that is step 1, and that's one thing Blizzard is very good at.

Amen.  I had a very similar experience with WoW. It was fun for awhile, then I got bored. I would love to see something more complex, as long as they remember to keep the fun first.

It's very easy to forgive the 'generic loot' scheme of green items once you realize they're only meant as filler pieces and for enchanters to have something to DE for materials. Naming 10k bits of trash loot something unique would be silly.   Yeah, green items may be your bread & butter for leveling-up but that goes pretty quickly.

 Quest items and blues and then purples are what you're meant to e wearing at 60, all those have unique names.  Even playing only quasi-casually on my 60 (the time played reflects my Alt-love.. I'm running 6 chars) I've managed to fill it with blues and quest items in all but 3 slots.

As to the depth of the game, I don't think you're ever going to see MTG level of depth in any MMO, though that's some people's ideal.  It's too hard to balance, and devs are too exposed when they have to nerf.  Add on that 'depth' too far, far too many people (including devs) means 'time investment'.  Also,  too much depth also begins to mingle with that complex 'virtual world' problem Xilren mentioned.

Myself, I'd rather see more "shallow" games like WoW evolve. Simple is fun for the majority of people, or else checkers would have gone away a long time ago.  Not everyone agonizes about their DPS and Min/Maxing their builds.  It's damned fun, and has kept my attentnion enough that I've played 3 characters into their 40 and above and 3 more into their 20s.  In short, what EG said.

Edit: Also, it occurs to me that too many devs and Jaded Gamers are dismissive of WoW. (See: Ara-shmuck's (http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=449713#post449713) latest VS post) They don't 'get it' because it doesn't appeal to them.  They're 'too hardcore' and their dismissiveness is coming from  overthinking things. This seems to be a problem that almost all of the 'most brilliant' game designers (as nominated by the jaded gamers) seem to suffer from after they're lauded.  They lose sight of the goal of FUN in their personal drive to create  Uber AI (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/blackwhite/) or a rich social experience (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com)  Nitpicking something by overthinking can ruin many a good thing. Just My Opinion, though.

One of my major sticking points is the non-scaleability of the group content, such as instances. It's been argued to death here, but I'd still like to see it. EQ2 already does this to a degree, and I think it's a great idea. Having to subject myself to the horrors of "Joe Sixpack - N00bler WoW player" is not a very enticing endeavor.

I wish we could just say "WoW got a lot of things right, enough to make it HUGELY SUCCESSFUL, but despite its numbers, it has huge fucking problems."

That's it in a nutshell. It is a fun game, with some interesting classes, an immersive art direction, moderately well-balanced and content-rich. But it also has serious backend technical issues, tons of cockgobbling, foreskin-licking retards, a team that is glacial at content updates and bug fixes, and an endgame focused on the same circle-jerk raid organization that has sucked it in the past.

And in the end, the gameplay itself IS somewhat bland, somewhat of a manufactured pulplike pastiche of MMOG's past and present. It IS EQ DONE RIGHT. That's ok for most. For people like myself, I can gladly play and pay for WoW without any sort of guilt, but I can also bemoan the fact that frankly, these motherfuckers had the money and the skills to do more. I weep thinking about what someone with WoW's budget and McQuaid's stubbornness (not his design skills or ideas) could have produced with the design GOALS (not the actual design) of Shadowbane.

Glad to see Katrina didn't steal your soul.

Actually I would say almost the opposite. WoW got a lot of things not wrong, enought to make it hugely successful, but despite its numbers, it doesn't have any huge fucking draws.

WoW doesn't give you many reasons to quit. (Compared to other games in the genre, certainly) But it doesn't have many selling points on top of that. But maybe that's enough.

Agreed on point 1.   No sb.exe. No 12.6 patch. No Trammelization.  No broken chat server.  Only other game that really didn't give me another reason other than, "I got tired of it" was CoH.

Still disagree on point 2 though and the overal assessment that WoW didn't get a lot right.  Probably largely a measure of personal preference. I like the game, you don't. Simple.

Edit: Although prevalent server cues would have been something I'd think people would quit over.  I guess they're not around as much now and was we all know, the only way to get an addict to want something more is to keep him/her from it.

Agreed - this should be "mandatory" for any level-based game that claims to promote community/grouping.

This makes me wish I'd archived every dev post ever made on the pre-release, pre-beta SWG boards so I could post them here and make this statement even more godlike than it already is.

SWG is an example of colossal failure of project management. You know you have MAJOR problems when the guy in charge thinks the game will be ready to release in a couple of weeks, and it ends up taking months and months. That is very much a process problem.

Some things are the faults of individuals, and some things are the fault of a broken system. Having no idea what state you are currently in as far as completeness and quality is the latter. So I don't see that as a problem with "devs" in the sense of brain-trust. The project management aspect was just a mess, and that shouldn't be the designers. (If it was, then that was the first mistake)

Project management can't make a game fun, but it can make the quality and readyness state known.

Um.

While I agree with you 100% (because when you talk about games, you're not a retard), I still think you're being a little pot and kettle.

You used to write REAMS and REAMS and REAMS for the SWG boards.  You seemed to like a lot of ideas that were going into the game at the time.  (Back then I didn't know you, but I followed the boards and you were certainly one of the vocal ones.)  How then did it all turn to shit the minute it was released ?

As to WoW - it's a fantastic and fun and immersive and interesting game.  Which I have no interest in playing whatsoever after a 14 day break.  It's weird how that's happened, since the wife stills loves it.

We reckon it's the priest mini-game and the socialisation that she likes.  I've just totally gone off it.

While I admit that WoW is certainly a fun game, I would prefer to establish proofable check points for MMORPG. Because judging "fun factor" is an endless and futile task.

IMHO what Blizzard demonstrated is that:
- It is possible to release a MMORPG that has a lot of content right from the start for all classes and all level ranges.
- It is possible to release a MMORPG that has almost zero bug right from the start.
- It is possible to release a MMORPG that doesn't need complete class rebalance right from the start.

Every MMORPG I have played before and after WoW seemed the result of amateurs compared to WoW. Blizzard demonstrated once again that every one of their games is top quality. Making every potential buyer look forward for their games. Even the most casual ones. And this is where the money is.

In Tri's defense, Ironwood, if you remember he backed off and stopped posting before even pre-public beta when it was obvious Raph was leaning more towards Callisto and all the other Hardcore "PVE & RP ONLY" players and combat was getting the short shrift. 

Which makes me wonder why they've been racing to provide more and more content for the high level game, if there was so much 'right from the start'.
*insert video of koreans making fun of loot lag here*
Again, curious how pretty much every patch has a major alteration of one class, and the dev-released 'Battle Plans' say they are continuing to go thru the classes to try to get closer to balance.

What it's really proved, is that the drugs Blizzard packs in their game-boxes seem to make their fans explode into hyperbole.  Yes, Blizzard tends to make decent quality games, but only relative to the rest of the industry.  They are not the paragons of perfection you make them out to be... they're just okay.

Alkiera

Caella, not callisto, and I remember well leaving those boards for good the moment they began the outcasting revisions.  I admit, though, I may have never actuallystuck with the game, considering I have always had a problem with some of the things they were devoting resources, and the fact that Jedi's were UO necromancy for the longest time before becoming the catass-badge profession.  Also, as far as I know smugglers are still incomplete as a profession, which was what I had originally wanted to devote my time towards.

Fuck the gaming gods in their ivory towers, I just want the fun pvp you motherfuckers keep promising.  Leave the roleplayers to their chatrooms and MUDs until you can actually integrate PvP and roleplaying without the infiniwhine of the name-nazis.

/diatribe

This is a fair criticism.  But most of the time, my posts were railing against the very idea of pseudo-psychological theorems as the basis for gameplay, not pushing another pseudo-psychological theorem as the basis for the gameplay I wanted.  By the time the 100 person Beta1 rolled around (invited but didn't participate, did participate briefly in still-closed beta2) it was like I was in a college freshman psychology class.  

For instance, after learning what the lay of the land would be pvp-wise, I advocated servers that were in design not unlike what the WoW PvP servers are now.  Even if your design is PvE, some people want PvP.  Why not give them a few servers?  Forum monkeys, in addition to the standard "omg take all r teh resources" argument, would argue things like "Adding PvP servers will only contribute to a general atmosphere of divisiveness on those servers.  This, in turn, will gradually poison the attitudes of everyone else, leading to decreased fun for all" or "PKs caused unlimited grief and misery in UO, why should we reward them now?"  These arguments, while not coming directly from the devs, seemed to be taken seriously by them.

The entire concept of Outcasting in the original PvP design was if you killed a neutral in PvP lands, they could remove your ability to initiate PvP forever, BUT if they forgave you you could do it again.  UO touched your genitals in a non-consensual manner, but by god now you can MAKE THE PKS PAY by holding their wretched ability to pvp OVER THEIR HEAD.  And this will heal your soul.  If the goal was taking out non-consensual pvp, they would have done it altogether (which they did, fairly early in the pre-beta process).  But the goal was you being punished for some 12 year old you've never met killing a PvE board warrior's miner.  To this day, I regard the concept of Outcasting as epicly Freudian in design and the high water mark of the UO therapy movement in MMOS- no other proposed MMO system has ever been so obviously designed to cater to grief and rage filled burn victims.

So, in sum, I left when the desire for a good game got left in the shuffle.  SWG wasn't an end unto itself, it was a transitory mechanism to heal all wrongs in MMOGdom forever through the sheer brilliance of its design.  I said as much on countless occassions, and when it was obvious the three credits of Intro Psych crowd of posters won I left.


EDIT: I should say I did have and still have a very high opinion of Raph.  He took on his shoulders some of the worst excesses of UO and I think this game was his attempt at atonement.  He is a brilliant guy and I think if he goes into something saying "I want to make a fun game" rather than "I want to split the MMO atom and change everything forever" he definitely could.         

People shouldn't be allowed to say "We just want fun x" anymore. It's too profound. Also, it's not constructive.

Now I have to go outside because I need oxygen.

Wanna make out?  Anyway, I like Koster as well, I hope he is able to adapt to the WoW landscape, and I don't want to seem like I'm taking a potshot here (it's intended more as a smelling salt), but posts like this one pretty much sum up the arrogant and misguided conventional wisdom of the pre-WoW era (the fact that it was broadly defending SWG, or at least its design ideals, as the summary game puts it over the top):


http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=735.msg15063#msg15063

WoW is the summary game.  It showed us which of the old rules were just wrong, and which of the old important features were dead wood.   The old-view "we must be radically innovative and extremely broad or the player base will shrink" opinion is also in evidence there.  There are now four million reasons to believe that's not true.

WoW is the model.  Yes, it could be better if some things were added to it, but it is the Model T of MMOGs.  Deepthinkers of the MMOG world: go forth invent automatic transmissions and heated seats!  But if you come back with one more goddamn dog sled or unicycle, your're fired.

* Raises his fist *

What about art and vision?

With the low polygon count of WoW this game would be stillborn if it were not backed by a great artistic vision.  The city Thunderbluff, for example, to me is such a spectacular projection of North American Native culture into a fantasy game I wonder if it will garner attention some day that transcends the game itself.  In games like this ask yourself - what zones - if any - you have visited stood out in your mind?  Several dramatic images come to mind with WoW, including the racial starting areas for the Horde.

When I look at this game I see themes (racial culture, horde vs. alliance conflict, geography) WoW has been very consistent, disciplined and ingenious at reinforcing.

When I look at it I see Warcraft III. Which is to say, 6 years ago the graphics would have impressed me. As it stands, this style is no longer original. It's something the artists at Blizzard were comfortable with, yet still managed to have less than inspired attack animations.

On the flipside, the graphics in WoW say game. Which WoW achieves. It is a game. The graphics in EQII for example, say "virtual world" ... which it damn near fails at. Had the graphics in WoW leaned toward the realistic, it wouldn't have worked. There are no lies in what WoW gives you. It's one half of a virtual world. The graphics are fitting for that.

I mostly agree with what your saying except this angle.  When you look at the cinematic footage for WoW - I am blown away.  If WoW could be made some day with the caliber of graphics used in their Cinematics ... that would be impressive.  Still a "game" yes - but the "game" works with expanded graphical display.

The reverse is not true for EQ2.  Take those graphics and reduce the polygon count - and what that game has to offer literally disappears visually.  The game relies too much on textures, too llittle on a vision about the actual shape of models for gear and avatars.
 

I started playing some Everquest 2 again after a stint in World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft, while it has it's faults, has immersion, atmosphere, and art that is unparalleled. Playing Everquest 2 makes me miss some of the really cool areas (like the creepy, haunted zones)

As far as I'm concerned, take the world and the art from WoW and continue to refine the game mechanics, and you have a winner.

Four million players say they already got that.

In other news, EVE recently broke the 15,000 simultaneous players mark. Why mention this? Just to point out that seeling millions isn't necessarily a good measure of success - so I contradict myself. Whatever.

What, me? I'm just waiting for my WoW server to come back up. Stinking unstable game.

Ah right. Shows how forgettable she was.  What amused me most of the whole situation was when she posted that it was a game she couldn't enjoy, and was far too combat-oriented for what she wanted.   :-o :roll:

Edit:  Also, on the WC3/ WOW art. All you're seeing is consistency at the design level, it's not WC3 models imported into WOW like is so often asserted.   I reinstalled WC3 this past weekend because I wanted to see how the world maps there compared to the WOW maps since they were forced to some level of consistency in a 3-d world.   The # of polys and the way models look is completly different. Sure, WOW doesn't use OMG EXTREME POLYCOUNT, but that makes it a hell of a lot friendlier for those of us who don't have 'bleeding-edge' or even 'cutting edge' systems. (I.e. Most of the computer-using world.)   It's good business sense to design for systems people have now, not 5 years from now because then people can actually, oh I dunno, play your damn game. (You can do art/ engine upgrades a-la Luclin) 

If you're asserting that they should have come up wtih a completly different art concept.. well then you're just a damned fool.

I don't think they should come up with a different art style. It's the warcraft art-style as laid forth by WCIII.

I just think it looks like poo.

Ugh. Her and her cronies killed any fun the beta boards may have been. There was some other asshat whose board name has disappeared into the mist of time that I butted heads with constantly over SCS. It was totally frustrating to write cogent posts advocating multiple characters per server, only to have this drooling imbecile defend SCS with every mispelling and malapropism in the book. I think I know how Gore and Kerry feel now.

I'd give you the name, but I like you.

Hum that comment is worse than the ones I made. You say Blizz makes decent quality games... what that qualifies other games as ? Huge stinking piles of code put together by newbies? ;)

Given the magnitude of WoW compared to other games, it's amazing that so very few problems have popped out. Maybe I am in denial as an old AC2 player but after having seen how other games were crippled by bugs and balance problems, I say WoW is a little jewel of perfection. And one class revamp every other month is not total class rebalance, it's merely adjustements given how a MMORPG is such a complex thing.

Given all that goodness... Add some amazing content & mood, and you have a winner.

FFXI is clearly the king as far as monster and gear shapes. (And player characters) The models in FFXI are pretty incredible overall, from Orcs and Goblins to worms to ameoba type things, from 2 handed swords to scythes to monk gloves.

I always find that a lot of American-made games tend to go for a realistic look, which ends up being just bland. There is a trick to making artwork that is stylized but not wacky. For example in the old street fighter games, when Ken does a punch they draw his punching arm really big. In still shots it looks absurd, but in the game it makes sense and draws attention to that body part.

People going for an overly realistic style don't realize that some stylization helps players focus on the important aspects of their characters and differentiates things more. I would say that FFXI does that better than WoW, but WoW is clearly ahead of a lot of other games. A lot of it is just basic stuff like if a guy is going to be skinny make him really skinny, if he's short make him really short, if a weapon is big make it really big, etc. Bring out the differences in things.

As you mention about textures - a good test is to render the player and enemy models in all black with no shading or textures and see how recognizable they are. Manye games would fail this test rather spectacularly.

Faggoty childlike "man" wielding an eight-foot machete for the win?

FFXI is 'clearly' for queers, that's about all. Why do you defend/mention that game in every thread?

Hurm, what can I safely say here.

Generic mea culpa on overthinking, blah blah blah.


Couldn't agree more.


Couldn't disagree more. Unless you want to only play WoW over and over again for the next few decades. In my mind, there's a lot of lessons still to be absorbed--and that doesn't take away at all from Blizzard's achievement.

Margalis, your statements are IMHO not on target, but since I can't refute or discuss them without revealing stuff that I can't except perhaps over a beer and with you sworn to secrecy, I'll leave it at that.


I submit to you that much like time is currency in MMOs, all of the above are largely about spending time and money. Anything is possible with enough manhours. Much of Blizzard's pre-eminence is due to their willingness (and sheer financial ability) to hold games from release until they consider them to be done. This is not merely an aesthetic on their part; were they unable to do it from a business perspective, they would have to just ship.

Even fun can be reached towards via iteration, and I say that, again, without taking away from their accomplishment. They are very skilled game designers and experience designers over there. But they also operate under different constraints.

Players have no reason to care about this behind the scenes stuff--they (rightly) judge things purely off of the shipping version of the game. But I have to say, in building daydreams about the future of games out there, you should keep it in mind. I literally do not think there is a single other company in the entire industry who has the particular circumstances that Blizzard did in making WoW.

Instead, I predict that the impact of WoW will be a lot of folks trying to get comparable success by NOT making games like WoW.


Heh. I think you're not giving outcasting enough credit, seriously.

The key thing that made me really like Outcasting was that after getting your "license" revoked, you could go to a local player govt to have it reinstated within that govt's territory. Over time, territories should acquire differing flavors based on how they go about doing that.

If I could have, I would have tried that without having safe areas at all. The whole thing doesn't really fit Star Wars very much though, so it was probably right for it to go away.


If WoW's a summary game, then that means you think that social gameplay is irrelevant, user creativity is irrelevant, crafting is irrelevant, housing is irrelevant, and I could go on and on. What WoW has, it has done very well. But it's far from having everything that people want, regardless of what numbers it is hitting. So I'd say it is a summary game for a particular branch, for a particular set of features.

I do think that WoW definitely showed that there's a heck of a lot more people out there interested in the tried and true old gameplay model. I freely confess that I was as blind to that as everyone else, because of my biases. We should have all known given the situation in Asia--instead, we succumbed to a sort of "Korean exceptionalism" idea that was just wrong. In a way, it was a betrayal of the grand notions we always all had about how important and compelling online worlds could be.

I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons to take from WoW.

I'd say that for the most part, crafting and housing at least are irrelevant.  They strike me as the kind of things devs put into MMO's just because the other MMO's have them so that they can list crafting and player housing in their list of selling points for the game.  Of course I look more for the game rather than the world, and rarely have either of those things ever been made fun.

WoW does have crafting though, and unlike most MMO's there are a lot of useful items that can be made through crafting.

Ahem, Raph, it'd be nice if SOE let you do something with everything you've taken from WoW.

Well, that's not why *I* put them in a game. :)

WoW implements a fraction of the total possible economic game surrounding crafting... and it CAN be a very fun game taken as a whole, though it's definitely for the more strategic type of player interested in business sim-style gameplay.

I also know there's a lot of people for whom forms of play surrounding housing have been fun. *shrug* Different strokes for different folks, probably.

Why are you people so stupid? Seriously. I've said FFXI is unplayable. That said, it does many things well. Character/enemy models are certainly one of them.

Is it really that hard to grasp? Apparently so - if you are incredibly fucking stupid, which you obviously are.

Whether or not FFXI is a good game or for queers (as opposed to whatever game is for retards like yourself) really has nothing to do with my point, now does it? Wow, reading comprehension is difficult!

I mentioned FFXI because it's on topic. The art direction in FFXI is far superior to WoW. And that's what people were talking about. Imagine that!

Edit: This post isn't nearly nasty enough. The fact that you agree with WUA should be your first indication that you might be pushing the 50 IQ barrier. I like how my post had some actual content, while both you and WUA made some hand-waving arguments involving gays. You guys really add a lot to the discussion.

The reason I mention FFXI is that unlike you morons I am not so fucking stupid that I can only remember one or two games in the history of MMORPGs. If you are going to try to "learn" (look it up) by looking at past games, you might as well look at the games that did what you are talking about really well.

People like you are the morons that can literally only conceive of a game exactly like one today, except with blue textures. Even simply combining good ideas and implementations from different games (wow, how novel, I must be some super scientist) is way too complex and terrifying for you.

Maybe I would mention AC2 sometimes as well if I could think of a single thing it did well. You may notice I mention AO sometimes as well, because that also is quite good at least in some dimensions.

This thinking stuff is tough. Don't strain yourself.

---

Edit 2: I like housing. Because when all is said and done I can run around and hit things in games other than MMORPGs, and in most of those the running around and hitting is strictly superior anyway. I am moving more towards virtual worlds as it becomes apparent that virtual games are just normal games at a much slower pace, where the same amount of fun you might have in 10 minutes offline takes days.

That didn't stop you from getting it and playing... hmm, was it a mithra thief?

Anyways, WoW was fun.  For like a month.  Then the leveling is the same old same old.  The high end PVE was incredibly boring (I went to MC once, spent 4 hours bored out of my fucking skull while we cleared the same damn trash over and fucking over and I never went back) and the PVP is pointless and zergtastic.  I haven't played since like spring.  Next game, please.

No, you are wrong. And gay. Or something. That is all. I Nija/WUA super-genius have spoken!

FFXI did housing extremely well imo.  The instanced moogle house was an excellent addition and I don't see why we can have this in every MMO with 'cities'.

Hell, throw in buyable/craftable stuff for the house and you have yet another game within a game.  I always said that a WoW-art chess/backgammon/checkers would be an awesome addition to this game.

No, I played it, whoever you are. I play every game. I have two SWG boxes in my closet right now.

Anyhow, I found this really, REALLY funny -


I'm sure Blizzard was LOADED when they delayed the War2 launch until they thought it was good enough.

And I'm also sure that Sony is REALLY hurting for money, so much in fact they HAD to get SWG out the door or else they'd bomb.

I believe it's called a budget.




Also, I liked the look of EQ2 more than FFXI and WoW, but I had the settings jacked pretty far above "craptastic."

Not likely. I'm not trying to defend SOE here when I say that I blame LucasArts.

I'm happy that your opinion is on topic. It seems that my opinion that FFXI sucks is also on target. That's how opinions work. FFXI 'art' was grainy ps2-lowest-common-ddenominator garbage. Honestly I can't remember it much more than that. I was too busy expanding 6 different menus in order to cast a spell or use an inventory item to bother myself with looking at the graphics.

NEWAYZ Raph I wish you would take your pre-game speeches and put up or shut up. Do it or get off the pot. You say some good stuff before you really get started with games and it gets cut for various reasons.

UO for example, some of that stuff was gold. Like how you could get better at musicianship by playing guitar over time (which was never implemented, the time factor) and getting worse over time (which only happened for about 10 minutes in beta). Instead, they made it so seeing someone light a campfire made you worse at music, getting better was simply how many times you doubleclicked it, skill locks within a year, and music was used to WHAT? Make dragons attack each other.

Economy? Dragons leaving their lair to eat livestock sounds pretty cool even today. What do we get instead? We get 'spawn range' and 'don't wander XX from this tile'. Respawn in 5 minutes, don't sweat it.

Are you out to prove how fucking stupid you are? My comments were relevant to the discussion. "FFXI sucks" isn't.

[qote]
I was too busy expanding 6 different menus in order to cast a spell or use an inventory item to bother myself with looking at the graphics.

You really are just not getting this at all are you? How pathetic is it to fall back onto the same irrelevant tangent over and over? I didn't make FFXI nor have I played it in a year plus so your shots at it aren't accomplishing anything other than pointing out that you still can't figure out what anyone is talking about.



Yup, still stupid. If you are going to bash someone for something, bashing Raph for not adding wacky features and such is a pretty poor place to start. More ideas were cut out of UO and SWG than were ever even proposed for WoW.

UO and SWG are far from perfect, but it's pretty moronic to pick on those games for things like economy when there are MUCH riper targets.

If anything, the problem with Raph's games is that they don't focus on a narrow subset of things to get right, instead casting a wide net that is more hit and miss. Asking Raph to deliver everything he promises is the exact opposite of sound advice. You just have no fucking clue at all do you?

Dude...

First off, you should read up on how Sony is organized. Identifying SOE with Sony the overall corporation, or with SCEA, is a mistake.

Secondly, we're not talking about War2. We're talking about WoW. You may want to toss into the mix how many years WoW was in development, the size of the team that it took, and the eventual total amount it cost. If you can dig up any other figures for the cost of MMO games, that should put it in context.

It's a lost cause Raph. (Explaining to Nija, that is)

What are those numbers, by the way? Years in development, team size, and final bill?

Edit: I have another good question. (Good to me, anyway) At what point in development do you still have room to adjust things based on what you see happening in other games? For example, if someone was working on a game today and they wanted to incorporate things they learned from WoW without seriously derailing their schedule, how far along could they be in the overall dev process?

I would also be interested in the typical breakdown of the MMORPG dev cycle. I assume there is the technology phase, followed by full on art production, quest writing, etc. Could you break that into approximate timelines. For example, given say a 3 year development, at what point is the basic tech set, at what point does production kick into high gear, etc?

Wow, nice moment of clarity.

You discount that WOW has social gameplay, however.  It doesn't, it has plenty starting at level 20 and on through 60. Instances and Elites are social gameplay, they just aren't Required to advance.  Instances take at least 2 hours at the low level and can take up to 4 at the high end (non-raid). Hell, the entire endgame is this same social gameplay. The funny part about this is that this is actually where MOST Of the bitching about WOW comes from. Given the choice a lot of folks are just skipping quests when they say 'elite' or 'dungeon.'  Hell is other people.  Lucifer sits in the sea of Strangers in Online Games.

If you don't read their forums due to the signal:noise I can't blame you, but there's a LARGE segment of that 1-mil playerbase that just wants small-group stuff.  They have RL-friends who want to play with them, or like me are miles away from them and have kids and want to game online.  There's a segment of people that don't play these games to make friends so much anymore. Large-scale MMOs are an 8-year-old genre if you start with UO like most do. Folks are brining their own friends and want to play with them, forcing them to interact outside of that circle may be necessary on some levels, but forcing it at all levels just gets you backlash.

Too many MMO designers assume "Social Gameplay = Large Raids & Huge Groups!" After all, if you didn't want to meet and play with 100+ people you've never met face to face you wouldn't pay for an MMO, right?

Wrong.

Social gameplay is gameplay that requires other people, period.  IMO 5-10 people is the max you should need to accomplish almost anything, including "uber loot" in Item-Based games.  Sure, you can still design content for those 20-40 person encounters because there ARE people who enjoy them.  They shouldn't be elevated above the rest of your customerbase in item games by giving them the best loot any more than 1000+ person guilds should be an indominatable force in a game like Shadowbane (Which killed all 'the fun' on servers so dominated). 

Look at it this way.  The mobile telephone is one of the most advanced social tools modern man has. It allows instant communication with anyone at any time. Can I have your number, Raph? Just post it here publicly, it'll "encourage" more social interaction on your part. It'll be fun, think of all the new people you'll meet and the excitement each time your phone rings!

No? Now think about why you don't want to do that from a gameplay perspective. Now think about those of us who have smaller circles of friends, or even refuse to have a mobile phone at all.

Edit:
Without any venom at Raph, he's just not a good lead designer.  Fantastic ideas guy with wonderfuly broad ideas that I'd love to see in games.  However, he's way too cerebral and creative and needs someone to keep him in-check and force him into reality more often.  Management is not a good job for creative personalities. At least that's why I enjoy busting on him the way I do any time he pops up.  :-D

I like this argument.  Makes a very good point.  In short, Amen, brother!

Alkiera

I think I agree that social gameplay as is requires too much social.

For example, forming a group.  Whats the typical process?  Two or three people meet up and form a group (this part happens almost instantly usually) and then depending on circumstances filling out the rest of the group requires far more time, spamming chat channels and looking for friends.

Why isn't the group dynamic centered at three then?  Duo's and trios are very popular because they are very easy and still have that social connection.  Unfortunately most games see a tiered structure where you are either alone OR in a full group OR in a raid group (exclusive ors).  There is no real flow from one level to the next.

I would like to see an end to group limits all together actually.  If you just let natural ad-hoc groups form to the size of the immediate desires of the players I bet you would see the vast majority of time spent in a group will be 3 or less with the occaisional foray into bigger 'mobs' for a specific purpose.  Why differentiate at all between 'raid group' and what-ever.

I think you guys are narrowly defining social gameplay.
What about costume contestes in CoH and weddings in RPGs, you guys are talking about situations where developers strong arm the players to work together to get some reward.

Yeah, they're talking about multiplayer achiever gameplay as "social."  Just a use-of-terms thing.  What you are describing is more traditional Bartle Social player type.   

Because we give a shit about your hairdresser gameplay?  If it's an issue to you bring it up.  Don't accuse other people of not dreaming up solutions to your problems.

The only problem I see here is the bug up your ass.

That's the context I took Raph to mean.  All those other social gameplays are extras that develop out of the nifty tools players are given.  Even then WOW has some of those.  Naked gnome races, cyborzing elves, fashion contests from those who care to collect sets (guilty).  However, unless you're developing a Graphical MUSH/ MOO (hi Second Life) those are secondary in the minds of the players who are playing a GAME and want something to DO. Those players are also the majority of folks who'll bother with video games.

Wanting to push everything towards 'virtual world' and expecting everyone to follow is going to leave you with some sparse company in the wilderness while everyone else is Downtown.  This is what Raph was talking about when he mentioned he gets too caught-up in the 'potential' that's there and WoW kicked him in the pants.  The world in general is only beginning to accept video games as anything more than something anti-social geeks and teenagers play.  Going from 'oh video games CAN be fun for everyone' to "Hey here's a virtual world" is a big leap, and one that's not ready to be made by the majority.  That's why worrying about the extras should come second unless you're specifically developing the entire project around those extras.

Yeah, you can include all those other bits, because they make a game a more vibrant experience. However, you can't let them cloud your vision or try to make more of them than they should be for the project you set-out to create.  Scope creep is as big a killer as feature creep, and if you see all that potential both are just as likely to happen.

First off, you are correct. I don't know anything about how Sony / SOE / SCEA is organized. All I know from growing up in the US is that Sony = $. If the title has Sony in the name, Sony is backing them somehow. Big money. Walkmans.

Secondly, I know we aren't talking about War2. War2 was one of Blizzard's first big games, back when they had Diablo, (maybe, my timeline is a little off), Lost Vikings, and Rock N' Roll Racing. Yet, whoever was in charge there got the suits' permission to hold off shipping the game until they were ready. So this small studio with very little name recognition was able to take their time and release the game they wanted to at their leisure.

The people leading projects at SOE do not get permission from the suits. Going back to even Tanarus, which was a rushed mess. It was probably 5 patches short of a solid game. If that sounds familiar, that's what everyone (everyone who reads forums like this. ie 0.007% of the mmorpg population) expects from SOE games 9 years later.

Finally, a decade into the future from War2, the one studio that is known for taking their time is still Blizzard. I don't know why that is, but I know it works. Yeah it took money and people up front, but it paid off. I bet they make enough money every other month to develop UO all over again. At least when you begin chasing suits to get permission to do your next game, you can tell them how releasing a finished product works for Blizzard, re: WoW took money to make money, cause apparently they've been ignoring the Bliz Method* forever.

* - Releasing a 99% complete product instead of a 66% complete product.

I see you've played other MMOG's.

We get back to how exp/levelling limits what these games can be. Get rid of it. Then groups can be as many people as anyone wants because the group basically just becomes a private chat channel.

ALL, every last one of those things you mentioned is entirely and irrevocably irrelevant IF the core gameplay, the stuff you spend most of your game time doing is not fun. All of those things will net you almost nothing if the core gameplay is not fun. And for most MMOG's, the core gameplay is combat. Now if you want to make those things the core gameplay, that's fine, but then you are leaning into either niche territory, or you are making a game for a completely different audience than that which WoW is made for. And since we're talking about WoW, they aren't completely irrelevant, but certainly sublimated.

Everquest did not have great social gameplay (in the sense that the tools you used for such gameplay were shitty shit shit shit). Same goes for UO. User creativity in EQ? Absolute zilcho. NADA. Crafting? A complete waste of time, at least until about 1 1/2 years into the game, because the interface was crap and the stuff you could make was useless to the core gameplay. Housing? Not even in the game.

Yet it was a fun game (that got really old after a long while playing), and it was successful with the same market that WoW has now blown up. And for the moment, that is the MMOG market. Yes, there are other segments of the market, none of which are being explored other than by really small niche developers like in ATiTD or Second Life. Maybe WoW's success will lead to other devs trying to make games in those other untapped segments.

That is not a fair characterization of what I said (or meant to say).  I don’t want WoW over and over.  I want WoW better and better and better (both by refining the elements already there and by adding new elements).  I don’t want to drive a new model T every 2 years for the rest of my life.  I want a new, better car every 2 years.  What I am not interested in is some company telling me that really, deep down, I’d rather ride one of their giant octopi to work.


If this is true, the rest of the industry is going to have to get used to being Blizzard’s bitch for the rest of time.  What you are telling me here is that SoE (and everyone else) lacks the ability to compete.  If they are able to spend time and money to make high quality games and SoE is not able to spend nearly that much time or money, then SoE just doesn’t matter anymore.  Every other MMOG maker will spend the rest of their professional lives scrambling against each other for whatever crumbs fall off Blizzard’s table or hope that Blizzard somehow self-destructs and sinks to SoE et al’s level of ability so they can actually compete.
I think you are pretty far off base here.  Social gameplay?  I had more people on my /friends list in 2 weeks of WoW than I did in the 2 months I played SWG.  Because I actually need other people – not just their vendor bots, but real, live other people – to get what I want.  And the group play is fun.  Crawling through Uldaman, BRD, Scholo, UBRS, etc to nail all the quests is fun and brings your group together.  Dying, refining tactics, dying, refining tactics, dying, refining tactics with my guild on Onyxia was an intensely social experience.  Same with Mojordomo and a couple other MC bosses.   Last week I and 39 other Hordelings watched our tower burn in Alterac Valley and the alliance press the attack (yes, that’s El Gallo, strident carebear, enjoying PvP because WoW actually made it entertaining and non-punitive–another way WoW obliterated its predecessors).  Then we got our act together and gradually pushed them back and took their base.  I met some new people on the raid, though I knew most of them from grouping or just hanging around in the past.  More than a few really impressed me as players, and more than a fee made me laugh.  When we won, people were shouting all over Orgrimmar that we finally won one, so there was a bond with others in our faction who weren’t even in the fight.   The only major Western MMOG that is this social is EQ.  Now, is WoW perfect on the social front?  Of course not.  Could there be a bit more encouragement to socialize early in a character’s life?  Yes.  Would I like to see integrated voice or voice-to-text so we can have EQ-intensity socialization with WoW’s active combat and low downtime?  Yes.  I’d like to see the next game work on that a bit.  But, yes, I’d call it the summary game on socialization: it modeled itself after the best 1st gen socialization game – Everquest– and sucked out the suck.

Crafting?  I craft more in WoW than I did in EQ or SWG.  Crafting is plenty important.  I use disposable crafted goods (potions, bombs, discombobulator rays, etc) all the time and constantly buy them from and sell them to other players.  Even in the high end game, I use at least some crafted gear all the time and even find myself bagging a lot of high-end boss drops in favor of tradeskill-made gear depending on the situation.  Now, can you spend 6 hours a day with a Punch The Monkey crafter minigame like you can in EQ2?  No.  This does not make me sad.

Creativity?  Not sure what you mean here, but if you mean customization then, yeah, WoW could be a little better.  If you mean emergent gameplay, there is a fair amount of it though not as much as EQ.  If you mean creative combat tatics, WoW blows away its predecessors.

Housing?  You are stretching to say this is a crucial game element.  But I do like houses.  WoW with well-done housing would be superior to WoW right now.  So go make me that game and I’ll pay you money.  But you already told me that your company can’t do that.  What your company can make is a hastily-thrown-together shadow of WoW with decent housing.  We all see how well that is going.

Now you seem to be saying that a summary game has to have every feature from every game in the prior generation (which does not jive well with the claim that SWG was intended to be a summary game).  I think that deciding what features are worth spending a ton of time and money on and what features aren’t worth spending a ton of time and money on is probably the most important part of making a summary game.  WoW realized that it is worth it to spend a ton of time and money on:
1. environments (I’m a broken record here, but this is critically important.  Randomly generated content is garbage content.  Blizzard is making Fantasia and Snow White.  Hanna-Barbara cartoons will not successfully compete).  Blizzard learned this from the success of EQ – this was EQ’s best feature – and the relative lack of success in AC and SWG.
2. combat.  This is what the overwhelming majority of people like to do best.  It cannot suck, it just cannot.  AC, AC2, SWG and EQ2 obviously needed total from-the-ground-up revamps on the day they were released.  WoW needed tweaks.  Blizzard learned this from the failures of the aforementioned games, but mostly from simple common sense.
3. polish (on everything: interface, content, systems, etc).  Things will never be perfect, but for the most part things should just plain work and not look utterly asinine.  In EQ2, sharks chase you across long stretches of dry land 10 months after release.  ‘nuff said.      
   
  What was the first computer roleplaying game you played?  For me, it was Akalabeth.  Basic linear character builder with heavy emphasis on combat.  It was fun.  Let me think of the CRPGs I liked the most since then.  Ultima 4.  Most of the FF’s.  BG.  NWN:HotU.  KoTOR.  What did I spend most of my time doing in those games?  Killing shit.  What were the core mechanics of each of those games?  Character building and combat.  Yes, there were environments and stories that made them memorable, but that was the art you place over a rock-solid foundation of character building.  That’s just what this genre is.  Now, when I think to myself, “how do I make a game for people who liked CRPGs, but with thousands of players?” I think “well, lets make a multiplayer game on that same rock-solid foundation we’ve been using for 25+ years”  I don’t think “because there is a DSL line involved, we must tear down the old paradigm and start anew.”  The evidence was always there: Lineage, Everquest, Diablo.  Blizzard saw it and learned the real lesson of the prior era.

If you want to make a multiplayer business sim, make a goddamn multiplayer business sim.  I could see that being a lot of fun.  But do not market that game as a multiplayer computer roleplaying game.  I really think you are deceived by the unique position of UO as the first MMO of any size in the US.  With no competition, you can get away with that kind of bait-and-switch.  Now that there are games that actually give most players what they want, you can’t.


In the off chance you are still reading, does the “it” in the second sentence refer to WoW or to our notion of Korean exceptionalism?

I have answers, but I don't feel comfortable giving out figures for another company. Common estimates for WoW range from $80-100m, and I have reason to believe that this the right ballpark. Years, you should be able to estimate yourself. And you can check the game credits for team size...


It totally depends on what lesson it is. Simple interface things? Relatively easy. Core gameplay mechanics? Impossible without major resets.


For a from-scratch game, you aren't getting to work on the game proper for probably a year and  half to two years. Your content platform will be complete probably after 2 years though you can start generating content before it's all done, just with a fraction of the tools. If you have some tech to start with, you gain some of that time back as well, of course.


That's all combat gameplay. I grant that it is social, but it's still hack n slash.


Heh--I think you are falling into that trap yourself. By social gameplay I mean forms of gameplay that rely on social roles or constructs.


That's what producers are for. :)


You're listing stuff that happens everywhere, not stuff that is provided specific support.


WoW with support for weddings, for player houses, for a true shopkeeper role, and so on, is a better game. That's my personal belief. Do you disagree?

I DO agree that actually doing that is Hard(tm), and that by continuing to try some of us continue to run into problems. :)


Sony uses a silo model (you can read up on some of that via the articles about Stringer's challenges now that he heads the whole company). What that basically means is that each bit of Sony runs as its own business.


I can't speak to why they first got to do it. If one of those first "hold it back" gambles had failed, the company would likely have been gone. But they succeeded thanks to a really good game and a fair amount of luck (credit where credit is due, but at the same time, good games alone do not always win out, as we all know).

There's a snowball effect from there on out. A similar story can be seen with Valve; they started out, luckily for them, in a position where they could hold the game back because they were self-funded. They then hit it big, and were able to take on the even huger budget of HL2, which I have seen estimated at $40-50m--that's a multiple of what SWG or EQ2 cost. But once you have the cushion built up, you can afford to polish to come as close as you can to guaranteeing a hit.

Actually executing is critical too, of course, I do not mean to minimize that. None of this is meant as excuses or anything--I hope this is all taken in the spirit in which it is intended--a frank discussion of what the industry circumstances are and where it all might lead.


Absolutely. At the same time, UO was not given that sort of seed money in the first place. It was considered expensive for its time, but IMHO was done pretty darn quickly. Form Sept 1995 when the bulk of the team was hired (Starr and Rick were on prior to that), to an alpha at E3 1996 six months later, whereupon the client and most of the server was scrapped. Some time shortly after, the entire script system was scrapped too and redone, so we had to rewrite all the gameplay code we had scripted. E3 1997 we were in beta already, so it was one year from almost nothing back to something playable; I recall we had to have GMs spawning stuff right outside the place where we were demoing so that there'd be a steady stream of monsters. Right after E3, the server changed to accomodate 3000 instead of 300 players (it eventually hit around 2600 as a capacity). We shipped end of September. 2 years, 1 month; if you count the time when Rick was implementing basically by himself, 2 1/2 years.


Agreed. I don't believe that the fact that the core gameplay of current MMOs is combat is an irrevocable fact, but that's beside the point.


Point taken. I think there's a large audience of people like you. Certainly all the new folks that WoW brought in are probably like you.

There are limitations to what that will be. No player-driven economy, most likely. Almost certainly not stuff like player cities. There are game systems that just don't fit in that model. But if that is the model you want, then great. I suspect you can look at the text muds and find out exactly what you'll be getting. Assuming anyone licks the problem of doing it 10x cheaper than what it cost to do this time. I am not actually sure that is possible, though.


No, no, not at all. I would say, rather, that competing on those exact same grounds is probably silly. The trick will be in opening new markets (possibly with the same gameplay), finding new gameplay, finding new ways to develop the games. I also think it's probably a safe bet that Blizz overspent to achieve what they did, given the fact that it was their first one and they didn't have economies of scale developed either. This is certainly what all the indie games are going to do, because they have no choice.


We have different definitions of "summary game." Yes, to me it means "everything that it is good and works in the prior games, done extremely well." To you it means "the absolute minimum, done extremely well." I have no quarrel with that position, but it's not what I meant by the term.

We have differing views on how social a game WoW is, whether its crafting is interesting, and so on. I think all of these are attributable to gameplay preferences. Every single one of your examples is centered on the combat--you seem to define social gameplay as cheering after a fight, you define crafting by whether it gets you nice loot, and you define housing as a trophy case. To me, making these features robust involves playing them without dipping into combat at all.


Heck if I remember. It would have been on the 8 bit computers. Ultima I? Bard's Tale? U1 was probably the first one I really got into. To be honest, though, my pen and paper playing was far more influential on me than my CRPGing. My text adventure gaming was more influential on me. Wizardry bored me because it was nothing but combat. Again, I think this is a taste difference, and it informs all the above.

Even more so, though, I am coming at it from the background of online worlds. These have existed for as long as the CRPGs have, and while they spring from common sources, have had parallel but separate development for quite a while. Notions of non-combat gameplay have been "standard accepted fare" in online worlds since the days when CRPGs were still on the NES.

To my mind it would actually be quite tragic if MMOs ended up taking their primary cues from standalone CRPG design rather than online world design. A lot would be lost. Not saying that there aren't valuable things to learn there, but the way you phrase things makes it sound like you consider CRPGs the primary source of this. Fact is that the online worlds have a stronger heritage from Zork than from Akalabeth; the earliest games were in a lot of ways not about statistical character building as much as they were about collecting items to put into a "trophy case."


The notion of exceptionalism.There has been a sort of general "Asia is weird about MMOs" that implied that there was a much lower cap on the Western markets than there really was. If anything, we should be looking at Asia and saying "WoW has barely scratched the surface of the market potential in the West."

Not to be snarky, but THAT is why SWG had to go through a complete combat overhaul a year after release.

I'm not saying that crafters shouldn't be able to compete in the market or do their thing without combat, because they should. But, and this is key, the primary market driving MMOG's both in this country and in the booming markets of Asia is combat-oriented MMOG's. Lineage (both flavors) and all its clone offs. EQ1. WoW. DAoC. The new EQ-ified SWG. That isn't to say that MMOG's and Virtual Worlds as a medium are totally relegated to combat-oriented gameplay, but in this market, non-combat MMOG's haven't done so well.

Mini-games are great for an MMOG, but you should know your audience, and the audience in this country mostly wants some form of interesting combat or competition (I'm considering sports here too). All the rest need to be firmly supportive of that main form of gameplay. If they aren't, you are in essence nichifying this product within the MMOG medium. In the same way that action movies only toss in a modicum of "love interest" type of things, instead of long-drawn out mushy romance novel shit, mainstream MMOG's need to be combat/competition first.

I cannot suppress my tireles rebutter tendencies  :hello_kitty:


I'd say my definition of a summary game is a game that incorporates all the major lessons of the previous generation.  You and I disagree on what those lessons are.  I think the biggest lesson of the first generation is that combat is king (and the second is that a well-done, handcrafted environment is queen).  Crafting unrelated to combat is mostly a waste while crafting related to combat can attract a lot of interest.  Socialization works best when socialization is encouraged by the combat mechanism.  Actually, I'd agree to your definition.  I just think that WoW does, in fact, incorporate just about "everything that it is good and works in the prior games."  We just disagree on what actually was good and worked in those prior games.

I'm with Haem.  Non-combat mini-games are a plus.  But they are just that: mini-games.99.999% of the people who buy these games do so with the intention to kill things with a sword.  I don't think that will ever change.


You seem to think that "real" socialization can't happen when you're fighting.  Just in the past couple months I talked to a guy about trouble his young daughter is having, a woman who just put her dog to sleep and a guy who got a promotion and was jumping for joy.  Since I started playing these games 6 years ago, I've talked to people about their weddings and their divorces, about their kids' weddings and divorces, and their parents' weddings and divorces.  I've talked to all kinds of people about politics, love, music, books, sports, yadda yadda.  All those people were people I met fighting with in combat-oriented MMORPGs (EQ, AC, WoW).  You talk about game tactics, then start shooting the breeze about real life, and next thing you know you have a friend and are part of a real community.

Why isn't that "real" socialization?  I don't really know what more you could want.  None of that would happen for me in a game with shitty combat, because I wouldn't play it long, and none of that would happen in a game with solo combat and Designer Approved Socialization Areas (TM), because it feels awkward and forced -- I just wouldn't go out of my way to go there.  There wouldn't be many others there, anyway.

I feel this is sort of a circular argument. "Combat is king" in MMORPGs but only because they are designed that way. Now, El Gallo made the point that CRPGs are combat-centric, so MMORPGs should be too. Then again, FPS games are combat-centric but look at all the stealth-based games in the genre now.

I think I would phrase it as this: If you expect the vast majority of players to spend the vast majority of time doing 1 thing, that 1 thing better be pretty good.

In SWG players are clearly expected to spend most of the time fighting. The license is about fighting. Most of the gear is fighting-centric, as are most professions. Most of the landmass is devoted to monsters. Jedis are about fighitng. Star Wars is fundamentally a cheeseball adventure. There are players that can do other stuff, but it's very clear that fighting is what the game is ultimately about. Even the professions that are not directly fighting professions exist largely to buff fighters, create equipment for them, etc. Combat is the core of the game.

Loved Merusk's post.

On crafting, in SWG shortly after release a checkbox was added to delete a crafted item as soon as you created it, everyone thought it was a great idea.  If the two highest priority problems with your crafting system are people running out of backpack space because of crap items and your item database filling up with crap items, maybe your crafting system is crap.  Especially if everyone thinks the vast majority of items created deserve to be deleted immediately.

I like WoW crafting, "create all" is my favourite button.

Raph, here's your job:

1 - Take WoW.
2 - Make character skills more customizable.
3 - Make avatar appearance much more customizable.
4 - Make all the best items player-crafted.  All.
5 - Let critters drop mid-range items and rare crafting ingredients.
7 - Let endgame critters drop uber crafting ingredients.
8 - Let all items inexorably wear out over a long period of time, so they need to be replaced.
9 - Make sure that engame monsters drop enough crafting stuff to keep #8 from hurting too much.
10 - Branching quests with multiple outcomes.
11 - Let the quest choices I make (good/evil) affect how the world reacts to me.
12 - Faction PVP system that affects the world enough for carebears to notice.
13 - Faction PVP system that doesn't affect the world enough to wreck it for those carebears.
14 - Housing please.

There's your automatic transmission and heated seats.  Hop to it.  If you can find a non-leveling system that satisfies the masses as much as a ding does, that'll be a nice bonus.  But don't go crazy, it's not imperative.

PS:  I understand that Sony wasn't willing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into SOE for MMORPG development.  The lesson WoW teaches is, they should have been.  The really big money is here.  Amateur hour is over.

That's the best post you've ever made. You just jumped the internet shark.

I don't see how that would've helped EQ II. Perhaps it might have helped SWG but that's the only major NA MMORPG I haven't played yet so I can't comment on that game. The problems with EQ II are from bad design and gameplay decisions made early on that they have been painfully trying to correct since even before release. If your designers can't design a fun game I'm not sure how spending more money is going to help that process unless it's used to replace the team and start over from scratch like NCsoft has apparently done with TR. Spending more money can help you produce more content and increase the production values in the game but EQ II was never lacking in those areas.

Edit: fixed typo

WUA, nice post.  However, I am not sure about most of your suggestions. 

#2 is something I always see people ask for, but I'm not sure they want.  WoW has a fair number of balance issues already, between classes and between talent builds in the same class.  Even more skill customizability = more balancing nightmares, more time spent buffing and nerfing, and more time spent on content designed for each of the 100,000 different effective classes you now have.  Frankly, I'd like to see more diversity through different gear sets.  That avoids most of these problems because everyone has access to them.  If you could swap gear and switch from a shadow/disc priest to a disc/holy priest, the priest class would be a lot more able to function well in all areas of the game.  More specialization/customization would just make these problems worth.

#3 is nice if it does not come at the cost of interesting gear options.  But if you can significantly customize your body, you will end up with a much narrower range of gear looks.

##4-7, 9 I just don't get.  UberDragon drops Sword of Roxxorage and it goes to Joe Fighter.  Yippee.  UberDragon drops Ore of Roxxorage and Susy the Rogue/Blacksmith (or Susy the Guild Blacksmith Mule) clicks "combine" and out pops a Sword of Roxxorage, which goes to Joe the Fighter.  Uh, double yippee?  To me, it seems like the exact same thing only more annoying.  I don't understand why a crafter would find that system anything other than dull, and maybe even degrading.  Then again, some people profess to actually enjoy being buffbots.  Anyway, I don't care either way -- it wouldn't keep me from playing a game but it doesn't seem to have much point to me, either.  I certainly wouldn't want the dev team spending a lot of resources on this system rather than building us a fun Grendel's Great-Great-Grandmother encounter (with the Sword of Double Roxxorage!).

#8 players just hate this.  Hate hate hate.  I don't mind it that much, but mention the word "decay" and there's blood in the water on your message boards.  This just won't fly.  To the extent this is intended to combat deflation, bind-on-equip/pickup takes care of this.  To the extent this is intended to keep lowbie crafters able to sell their wares to lowbie players, BoE/BoP fix that as well.  To the extent this is intended to keep high end crafters busy creating Swords of Uberosity to replace worn-out Swords of Uberosity, people will hate it.  People want to fight to advance, they don't want to fight to keep from deteriorating.  You need to continually introduce better things to replace the old ones.  If they are crafted, you can keep your crafters just as busy as they would be under a decay system, and keep your adventurers just as happy (i.e. Instead of needing to buy a new Sword of Uberosity each month to replace the one that falls apart, which sucks, I need to buy a better sword each month to keep up with the Joneses).

## 10, 11, 14.  Thumbs up!

##12-13: No.  This is the classic cry for "PvP that matters but also doesn't really matter" which just won't work.  If there are real winners and real losers, you will have perma-winners and perma-losers, and you will screw over people who don't care to pvp.  That's unacceptable.  WoW's utter uninterest in doing 12 or 13 is one key reason WoW is vastly better and vastly more successful than its PvP-oriented competitors.


Totally agree, but I also agree with Trippy that SoE appears to just plain lack the ability to make a game that good.  Maybe management is screwing the pooch, maybe McQuaid took most of the game-making talent with him.  Whatever the reason, SoE is second-rate now.

I agree completely WUA, though I believe the highest end items should not necessarily NEED rare components to craft, that is something I would have to think about more.  I remember playing UO (Only game I can think of with true item decay, I know there are others) and chatting with blacksmiths as they repaired my metal armor and weapons.  It was a good way to keep the item portion of economy going circular, and it made people more careful of what they used ("maybe I should save my Sword of Godliness for special occasions and just use this other weapon instead!").

I like your list enough to go play Ultima Online now.  Seriously.

Right. As a player, this would actually turn me off. I like playing combat oriented characters and I like getting uber loot as a reward for killing monsters or completing quests. If ALL of the crafted items are better than what I can loot and most of my loot is crafting components you've just taken away one of the biggest aspects of the game for me. I like crafting as part of a game, but as a combat player I don't like feeling like the crafters' bitch. I'd rather see a balance between the two.

Not that it matters anyore really, but UXO actually had branching quests (some with more than one branch) implemented and working at the time it was cancelled. A lot of developers shy away from this because they feel it means each quest takes 2x the amount of work. In reality, it's only about 33% more work and if you build a good quest tool you can make up for that. We could build a quest with full branching, cinematics, NPC reactions, and everything in about 4-6 hours depending on complexity. Of all the features we had, I was most excited about seeing how players reacted to this one and since UXO will never be I hope someone does it someday.

I would like to see branching quests that offer variable risk/reward tradeoffs.

One branch could lead to a small chance at a really nice quest reward (random) with a large chance of an average to mediocre reward.

The other branch could be the safe, middle of the road option: An above average reward almost guaranteed.

I also would really like to see more cinematics tied to quests. It would be really cool to activate a quest and have a cutaway movie start playing. The cinematic would signify that, yes, this is an important quest. I can imagine doing quests just to see cool cinemetics. MMOs can learn a lot from story-driven single player RPGs.

FF XI has these in the major storyline quests. WoW actually has mini "in game cinematics" where some NPCs will act out things when you do quest turns-in and stuff (like the two Gnomes in Dun Morogh that give out the radiation quests for Gnomeregan).

2 - Make character skills more customizable. - I dont understand what this even means, so instead of being a 1hs knight I'm a bastard sword expert who specializes in overhand swings?  How about instead just use something that is less talent tree and more SB level complexity when it comes to character templates.  Discipline runes are a great idea, as are character creation runes, the mechanic for farming/obtaining them from disc droppers was not.
4 - Make all the best items player-crafted.  All. - How about no?  Your going against point #1 here, if your taking WoW its too fucking late to make a player based economy.  Like Gallo pointed out who cares if you need to kill uber mobs to get the key component to make uber sword XYZ?  I dont have a good economy solution for you but making it crafter dependent doesn't work in a game that isn't designed from the ground up to work like that.
7 - Let endgame critters drop uber crafting ingredients. - why?  This is the kind of thinking that gets us the stupid formula WoW is following now:  release new endgame raid, make drops from that be the best in the game, rinse, repeat but you added in the extra step of clicking combine 60,000 times for each crafting tree per guild so you can MAKE your uber item out of your uber drops.
8 - Let all items inexorably wear out over a long period of time, so they need to be replaced. -- This doesn't work if you have uber items


12 - Faction PVP system that affects the world enough for carebears to notice.
13 - Faction PVP system that doesn't affect the world enough to wreck it for those carebears.
So pvp on/off with world implications?  How do you see that working?  If it matters enough carebears will feel forced to pvp and complain (they are 90% achievers).  If it doesn't matter enough pvpers will be annoyed because it becomes another: why shouldn't I just play <insert fps here> for my pvp if its not going to matter?  As hotkey clicking and auto attack do not the fun make and what does it matter if your persistent character's action of choice doesn't mean squat to the big picture?  Its the same complaint crafter/economy types have when none of the items they can make matter as uber raid loot is better.

14 - Housing please. -- Margalis was spot on when he said that Mog houses or the equivalent should be in every MMO

Regarding character appearance customization, does it really have to be tied to your actual equipment? If a player wants his platemailed fighter to look like a cowboy, is that bad? Anything wielded could be "as is" but everything else shoudl be up to the player. There can be defaults, certainly: leather, studded leather, spiked plate, bikini plate that can be colored to fit tastes, but would it be a bad thing to let a warrior benefiting from armor appear to the rest of the world as a shirtless kung fu hero? CoH shows that it is fun to just appreciate player creativity even if it mean not being able to determine what class someone is by their look.

edit: How about going so far as to make body equipment not even slot specific? Instead of looting armor, you loot +ac or +fire resist charms that fit onto your character. You character has X number of slots. There is still the gear component to the game but appearance is completely discretionary.

I have to echo what people say about crafting drops. It's really just the same thing. Instead of dropping a super-sword, it drops a piece of metal I can turn into a super-sword. How is that really different, other than forcing me to rely on crafters if I don't have that crafting skill? Seems annoying for a player with a small group of friends.

I had an idea that MMOs should allow COH-level of customization, but define certain 'looks' depending on what your overall armor was.  A "plate" setting, a "leather" setting, etc.  The bonus is you also eliminate the "WTF My Ultra-Pious Conservative Paladin looks like an electrified stripper!" arguments.  Those who want cheesecake can do so those who don't can do so. Win-win.

Then, for those with the 'but I can't showoff my uberlootz' syndrome, aquiring a piece of uberloot can unlock a new model palette for that part of the body.  Unlocks are already used in MMOs.. they're called Faction Grinds.  They also satisfy a lot of casual achiever problems, so long as it's not tied purely into a 'you must sit on your ass 8 hours straight.' situation.

I have no problem with unlocking "clothing" options, as long everyone has a very broad selection to begin with.

Star Ocean: Second Story had my favorite crafting system to date.  I'm thinking devs might want to look outside the MMO spectrum for novel ideas on how to implement a player-controlled item economy.  Also, I agree with Calandryll that while crafting is nice to have, I don't want to be the crafter's bitch, because I see that as just a bad environment for grief as open-pvp, if not worse.

I am very much in that camp.  WoW did just enough to make me happy even if it's not as interesting as it could/should be.  Reverse auction, more varietal resource gathering, and housing would do it for me.  My slumlord days in UO were some of the most fun I've ever had in a multiplayer game.

IMO, WoW & CoH's main contributions are that coercive implementations of grouping and interminable leveling are not required to make a game profitable, and in fact past products that went that route simply introduced the escape pressures that inevitably damage retention when alternatives like WoW are released.

I don't know if I like having mobs drop crafting ingrediants. I would like to see some more 'visual' loot. If you kill a goblin who was wearing a leather skirt and had a spear, you'd be able to loot a leather skirt and a spear. If you killed some plate wearing brigand, you got his plate, along with what was in his backpack or fanny pouch or whatever. If you kill Archmage Doan, and he's got the hypnotic dagger equipped, you get to loot that. If he's using the staff and wearing the cape, he doesn't drop the dagger. Let crafters be able to use the leather from the skirt to to make stuff. Let the plate be able to be melted down and used towards something else.

I'm not big on the whole 'epic items - must catch the newest pokemon' type of gameplay that seems to be so popular. The kind of stuff I like would probably bore most people.

I want to see more lists. ElGallo, what's your list like?

I didnt renew my subscription. WoW is definetly the best mmorpg out there, and has proved to me one thing. I dont like mmorpgs. mmogs yes, rpgs yes, mmorpgs no. I need story, characters, plot. Level and skills should be a byproduct of playing through the game, not the whole point of playing it.  I'll stick to single player games when it comes to an rpg ruleset for gameplay from now on.

Well said...

/hits the crack pipe

Well said indeed.

I have no excuses. I guess I could say that I'm just filling in a void when a current batch of single player games aren't doing their job for me (i.e. I'm not playing an mmorpg because of it's own merits really..It's just that every other option isn't much better). Also, I enjoy to experiment with things.

That being said, the rest of this year looks to be pretty good for sp games...I'll really have no excuse if I'm playing WoW in December.

As someone with preferences much like yours... wait for City of Villains. I don't know if you've ever played CoH before, but it's kind of fun, but CoV adds lots of stuff that make it feel a lot more like a single-player RPG - and I mean that in a good way. The NDA prevents me from revealing things that haven't already, but they've already released, for example, that missions can have cutscenes in them. So, for example, you're halfway into this building to kill this rival gang leader and as you go through you'll see a cutscene showing that gang leader saying "Curses, Malderi is almost upon me!" and him getting his gun out - and so on and so forth. It sounds small but really adds a lot. CoV is damn good, and I'd suggest you try it. I'm a fanboy of CoH but CoV adds so much more to it.

I don't need 100k different classes, but each class having several distinct possible builds would be rather nice.  World of Warcraft tries to do this, with mixed results overall, but there's definitely room for improvement.  I liked how WoW allowed a normally one-note class like priests to branch out, but hated how they took a supposed hybrid-class like paladins and made them duller than shit.


Different approach, same result.  I just don't want there to be only eight types of player characters in the world, which is how WoW often felt to me.  (Keeping in mind, I only played to 39.)


If UO did nothing else well, it was this.  Bodies couldn't be customized at all, yet I could identify particular avatars without looking at their names.  I want "fluff gear".  I want purely cosmetic cloaks and sashes and belts that don't effect my abilities at all.  (Or numerous statistically-identical items which all look different, or the ability to make my Hat of Ownage look different than yours, or any of several other equally good ideas.)  I want to be able to dye my gear different colors, even if it does mean I have to look at retards who think neon-yellow platemail is fashionable.


Well, the fun-factor of crafting itself has always eluded me, but people seem to like it.  And if you're going to have crafting, you may as well give it a purpose.  Besides, done properly it adds a bit more economic and social interaction to the game, without beating you over the head with it.


I suppose you have a point.  With a big fat modern budget, they can just get off their butts and add more content, IE stuff to craft.  Still, you do run the risk of mudflation and imbalance.  Item decay is, to me, a way of harmonizing two desires that would otherwise be incompatible.  Number one, I don't want to have to spend a year at max-level before getting my Sword of Roxxor.  Number two, I don't want Swords of Roxxor to be so common that they're being used for doorstops six months after release.  Ergo, Swords of Roxxor must get used up somehow.  Let me elucidate the system a little further:

1 - There should be no single "best" sword.  There should be diverse weapons for diverse class-builds and intended targets.  I want a Life-Leeching Sword of Ogre Owning, not a Generic Sword of Slay Everything.

2 - These "rare" crafting components shouldn't be rare in the traditional MMO sense, where they drop once per eleventy-million kills.  No, every single dragon should drop scales that can be used to make Uber Dragonscale Armor.  It's just that killing a dragon shouldn't be trivial.

3 - Now that I think about it, go ahead and let some rare leet weapons drop directly off of monsters.  Hell, you can even make them indestructible.  So long as there's a craftable alternative that's almost as good, the have-not's wont be hurting too much.  And since there's no single ultimate weapon to use against everything, the occasional indestructible artifact won't have too much impact, except to give shiny-collectors something to strive for.

Of course, this could all just be more "Make me a modern UO!" rambling craziness on my part.


Yay!


I just want a PvP system where the effects are visible to an outsider, but do not seriously impact him.  When the Horde runs in and kicks the village's ass, have the buildings look damaged for a day or two.  That's all.  Give me the illusion that it matters, but not the griefsome reality.


World of Warcraft really IS the previously hypothetical "Everquest done right".
Unfortunately for SOE, that makes Everquest into "WoW done wrong".

This is an awesome quote.  Hope you do not mind if I steal it.  Recently (read: yesterday) I got into a "grey" UO server; UORedemption.  Thus far they seem to have done a wonderful job; it feels a lot like the way UO used to be.  In Por Ylem was good, but all the dregs really ruined it day 2 or 3 for me (after seeing someone named "Nigger Baby Killer" I logged off forever).  I think I am done with level based games; if UO does not take care of my itch I will probably hang up my jock strap and go back to console games.  Though this fills me with fright, considering I have not really played them in over 7-8 years (except for GTA:VC - man did I catass that game and loved every minute). 

I dunno, I guess key for me would be a game that offered deteriorating equipment, open ended player interactions (PvP, stealing, ect), no levels, and a crafting system that was intricate enough to placate those who want to play tradesmen yet simple enough that people could dabble (I have come to hate EQ2 crafting - swing and a miss there). 

I wish Neocron had worked out  :|

Yup, that would be perfect.  They already have city wide buffs for everyone present in the city when you defeat Onyxia, why not expand this to some sort of outdoor conflict, and award everyone at the home city with a Frontier-Fighter Buff or some shit.

My list for what it is worth.  Probably a little bit too general but oh well.

Characterization:
1) Interesting and customizable character advancement (branching skill systems, specialization, etc.)
2) Interesting visual character customization.

#1 creates fun for explorers, achievers and killers alike.  The best implementation of this to date is DAoC.  #1 and #2 together enhance player investment and identification with their character and allows players to feel that they are unique in the world.  #2 has been best implemented in SWG.  This one of WoW's weakest points for me and an area where I am surprised they didn't do better.  Look at Diablo for example -- that's the sort of character development I expected and has obviously already worked.

PvE:
3) Diverse and comparable PvE options (solo, group, raid, quest).
4) PvE with a wide entrance that leads to a deep game.
5) Power should grow in a logarithmic fashion.

#3 means providing PvE options for several styles of play without making one or the other feel marginalized.  Very tough to achieve.  #4 is a paraphrase of a comment made by Lumines creator Mizuguchi.  Make a game that is very accessible and where progress is easy to attain especially early on.  But make a game that is very open-ended and has depth to last players for months or years.  The wide entrance will be enough for casual players.  The deepness behind it will keep the more hardcore players interested.  I suppose I should give at least one nod to WoW and I'd say that here is where they have probably had their greatest successes.  #5 means diminishing returns.  On everything.  Allow players to spend hundreds of hours min-max'ing.  But even the most min-max'ed character should be within reach of those who are more casual.  Epic items should provide power increases of ~5% and not ~50%.   To those hardcore enough to achieve them this will be enough and to those who are more casual it won't be too much to break the game.

Social Gameplay
6) Social gameplay, of all flavors.  Housing, clothing, economy, grouping, guilds, guild houses, guild ranks.
7) Don't require social gameplay for those who are not interested.

Players do get into social play.  Dressing up in costumes, RP'ing, hosting parties, weddings.  SWG demonstrated that with its success despite failures in most other areas.  Entertainers were a mistake though.  Social play should be presented as an opportunity and not a requirement.  Rewards should be perks but not game-altering or required perks (EQ2 actually does a very good job of this with respect to guilds).

Crafting:
8) Interesting crafting system.
9) But make legendary crafting results dependent on CRAFTER actions.
10) Balance what crafters have to offer PvE'ers with what PvE'ers have to offer
11) Ample social opportunities in crafting.

#8: Crafting needs to be more than clicking combine or grinding.  That means creating a system interesting enough to where players can spend dozens or more hours just "playing" with results and learning how best to do things.  Crafting should be a game, not a grind (like SWG) and not a matter of collecting a specific flavor of loot (like mithril bars in WoW).  SWG despite its grind has probably done the best job of making an interesting crafting system.

#9 means: skip the whole uber loot as a crafting item.  It doesn't work.  Neither side wins.  The PvE'ers feel far too dependent on the crafters.  And the crafters?  It's not very fun for them either.  Someone shows up and demands that they do a combine (which takes them about 5 seconds and no player skill) and then runs off.  Instead, rare crafting "loot" should be a product of actual crafting.  This is an idea we actually threw around the SWG correspondent forum in several forms (not that it every got picked up :)).  There are many ways to go with this.  Most of them unfortunately turn into grinds if you let them.  But if designers use their imagination there are several ways through this.  Legendary successes can be a product of time passed and not of items created, for example.

#10 means do create some dependencies between crafters and PvE'ers but BALANCE them.  PvE'ers can and should supply resources to crafters for example.  Not uber loot to combine and turn into uber items but everyday resources that cannot be achieved through pure crafting.  In turn then the crafters can churn out useful PvE items.  Far too many games assume that there will be balance in these dependencies without actually making sure this will happen.  I'm not aware of any game that really does a great job of this.

#11: go the next step with player shops in SWG.  It works, it really does.  At least until they ruined it about 9 months ago.  This is a very interesting "game" for lots and lots of players.

PvP:
#12: Remove personalities from PvP.
#13: Same as PvP: power increases in a logarithmic fashion.
#14: Don't be afraid to change the rulesets.

#12 was implemented very well by DAoC and was ok but not quite as well in WoW.  Separate players a bit and allow them breathing room.  Don't let them scream at each other in game.  Those who require yelling and screaming will find their niche (forums) and those who are put off of it won't be affected by it in-game.

For #13: reward PvP and have it affect the world but have it do so with diminishing returns.  This is probably even more important for PvP than for PvE.

#14 means that you should treat balance for PvP and PvE as different beasts.  They are different games that satisfy different playstyles.  As such you shouldn't shy away from creating different rulesets.  It is very simply the best way to make sure that both realms are fun and playable.

IMO this is one of the most important lessons of non-WoW games: don't let your world design or the different playstyles that you try to reach negatively impact each other too much.  Don't let Jedi break your game.  Don't let PvE break PvP and don't let PvP break PvE.  Don't make social gameplay, crafting, PvE, PvP, RP, static content or dynamic content take too much away from having fun with other parts of the game.

The World:
#15: Enough static content to get players into the game.
#16: Enough dynamic content for players to keep them there.

Well, duh.

#15 is best done by WoW or EQ2.  You obviously need lots of static content to capture players early on.  Personally I don't care much for static content but I admit that it needst o be there.

For #16 try for lower-hanging fruit.  Go look at some of the very simple stuff that Achaea does (as well as some of the more complicated stuff).  SWG tried to this.  And failed.  Most dynamic quests had too little effect on the world and were too localized.  PvE, PvP and social play should all change the world in subtle and not so subtle ways.  It amazes me that more hasn't been done with this.  I think most designers just try too hard.  Let players vote in local elections for static cities.  Let players clean up or destroy the environments around them.  Let PvE'ers and PvP'ers both capture and own territory -- even if this has little gameplay effect beyond changing how these places look.  Make mob populations even slightly dynamic so that hunters have to wander around to find good populations of mobs to fight.  Make 6 PvE and 6 PvP shrines that followers of lightness and darkness fiht over.  The more of them that are dark, the darker the sky.  The more of them that are light, the brighter.  Very simple and great content.  Yet very little of this is actually done.  DAoC still has the best implementation of this I've seen and it is still lacking.

#17:  Keep trying to create fun gameplay that isn't all about combat.

A game is a game.  There are lots of multiplayer games that can engross players.  I think MMO's need to branch out more.  Let us play Texas Hold'em.  Let us do dynamic logic puzzles.  Let us play puzzle games ala Puzzle Pirates.  Let us breed monsters ala Pokemon, Jade Coccoon, let us drive vehicles as more than a means to getting a dungeon more quickly, etc.

Heh.  Where was Pazzak in SWG.  Or Sabacc for that matter.

WindUpAtheist is kicking ass over the last couple pages or so.  I don't agree 100% with everything (largely, as has been pointed out, that dropped uber crafting materials still equal a drop reliant economy), but pretty close.

Just one thing I'd like to address- PvE raids.

Stop it.  Just stop with the raids.  One full, skilled group should be all that's required to have a shot at the best stuff in the game.  DAoC, I'm looking at you.  WoW, I'm looking at you.  CoH, I'm looking at you (Hamidon counts).  Guild Wars, I'm... oh, well okay then.

No one but the worst MMOsochists enjoys trying to gather up 40 people at one time and getting them all to obey ridiculously complex instructions.  If you absolutely MUST HAVE BIG ENCOUNTERS, it should go no bigger than two groups.  And for christsake, if you're going to do something like that then take advantage of the fact that there are two groups!  Don't just say "Well, 16 people=more damage than 8 people!" and throw them up against a guy with lots of hit points.  Give them two separate paths to take which intersect at points but otherwise test each group differently.  Don't just throw different kinds of enemies at each group- maybe one group has to solve a puzzle or participate in a movement-based challenge (bring 30 of these from here to here in 15 seconds, go!)  But so many games insist on requiring players to throw ridiculous numbers at an enemy in what's supposed to be an "epic and challenging battle!"  It's NOT epic and challenging.  It's laggy, boring, and frustrating!  And people cheer at the end for the same reason people cheer when they graduate from school- it's finally fucking OVER.

In a MMOG, it is statistically impossible to gather 8 people who don't know one another and have each and every one of them be capable of paying attention and following directions.  When you DO manage to get together 8 of those people, it feels like you've won the lottery.  Then when you realize you need to win the lottery 5 more times until you have what you need to take down this "epic and challenging encounter", you either say "fuck this" and quit or grit your teeth and start recruiting morons who probably have to ask for directions to find their keyboards so they can ask for directions to the same spot you just fucking gave them directions for.  AND THE GAME FUCKING GIVES YOU WAYPOINTS TO FOLLOW.

I think I had a point in there somewhere.

Oh, right!

No more raids.  You've abused the privilege, and until you show me that you're capable of handling it responsibly you're not getting it back.

(Good multiple group encounters:
CoH zone events/giant monsters, because they come to you and in many cases all characters' attacks and defenses scale appropriately against them, so anyone can join in.
Over two years playing DAoC and I can't think of a single multi-group encounter I enjoyed there.  All the fun ones were either soloable or could be done with a single group.  The chess trial in ToA was the best thing I'd ever seen in that game and could be beaten alone, the majority of the rest of that expansion was exactly the opposite and should serve as a lesson in what NOT to do anymore.)

Raids Suck.

No, hotkeys suck. Honestly, if someone can come up with an alternative to hotkey based combat/crafting then creativity will flow forth. That one hurdle has fucked the genre. It's one thing for single player RPGs to have hotkeys (or a menu system). But it's another thing entirely for a competitive title to have hotkeys to drive the characters. There's simply nothing competitive about it. I don't care how much "skill" it takes to lay the smack down on a Warlock in WoW. The combat system is the byproduct of a bastard combination of goddamned narrowband support and thinking that players are drooling retards.

I hope WoW forces every single level based hotkey treadmill in development to be canceled. But that won't happen.

What good are lists when everyone wants to fund the next WoW? But if we're supposed to be giving lists, here's mine:

1. Breathing world. If you can't achieve that, I'll accept barely conscious - since that doesn't even exist yet.
2. Console/VoIP based. With combat like Dynasty Warriors, Zelda, Soul Calibur, Ninja Gaiden, or - hell, I'll accept Grafitti Kingdom.
3. Targeted towards adults produced with the grace and maturity of God of War. Not Grand Theft Auto.
4. No Levels. But if you're dead set on levels, at least make it as interesting as a Nippon Ichi title. And then when you realize that's too hard, get rid of levels altogether.
5. Something not based on motherfucking Tolkien.
6. Monsters that drop appropriate loot - see Breathing World.

I'm just going to stop. After I see what's in production at AGC, I may have something more cohesive. But at the moment, I'd be much more interested in playing the Japan-only titles like Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, Romance of the Three Kingdoms Online, or Front Mission Online. At the very least, there are no elves in them and they are far more interesting than anything involving a "fantasy world." And I don't even like robots.

My list is pretty simple, because being specific is too much of a design doc thing.

Pick one thing that your game is about. Don't just do it 'well,' do it so damn good that people won't stop talking about it.  WoW did this. CoH did this.  Then, when you've got that down PAT you can start adding-on other things.  That way, even if you run out of development time & money before you get them all done, the players still have one good thing to do instead of 300 crappy things to do. The extras will be seen as extras and can be more fully developed as you progress.

 It's got to be killing you, Raph, that people won't stop talking about COH and WOW despite them being nothing like what you want to see developed.  You've suffered from too broad a vision. Wow's been slowly adding-in other non-achiever things to play with.  The dressing room, the Darkmoon Faire (though even that has some achiever stuff. That is the focus of the game, after all.) fireworks for engineers.  Yeah, it's been a small portion of their updates, but again it's not the focus of the game, because it doesn't forget that it IS a game first and foremost in the minds of the majority of it's players.

Would I like to see all these bells and whistles people are talking about?  Sure, they'd be nice things to have, but they're not a requirement for me. Fussing over them and how 'it's not a world' if it doesn't have them means squat to me, and I suspect the same to most folks.  Combat's my thing, that's the competition and character development I crave and expect.  I'm a Bartle EAS, and my S was fairly low.

You want to develop a world, then focus on the social stuff FIRST.  Add-in content that will attract and dazzle those type of social players, not me and my type.  If I say "Meh, I wouldn't play it" it's probably a good social game.  Housing, clothing options, social interaction, cities. ALL that stuff from SWG would be great in any other game that the playerbase didn't expect action-oriented and intense combat.

Here's where you lost me.

What's the functional difference between driving my hero with WASD and making him do attacks with the numpad, and driving my hero with a thumbstick/D-pad and making him do attacks with the buttons?

--GF

Actually, the whole hotkey thing lost me entirely.  What're you trying to say ?  Should it be text driven ??

Yep, I'm lost there too.  You want pull downs instead?  No.

I want to jump on the "Raids Suck" bandwagon too.  Because, well, they do.

You know what bothers me most about Raids;  Apart from the fact that they take ages to organise and, like it or not, there are at least 20 drooling retards in a 40 man group ?

It's the lack of Epic scope.  They say it's an EPIC encounter, but honestly when did you ever see any legendary heroes stories where you had to amass 40 dudes to chain-gank some poor hapless computer controlled motherfucker ?  It's STUPID.  It also FAILS SPECTACULARLY to engage the excitement or adventure - it just reinforces the sense of jarring dissallusionment that all you are doing is facing the same fucking monsters except with the 'HARDNESS' button cranked up to 11.

I watched one of my wives Raid groups being taken apart by one of the mobs in MC and one thing I DIDN'T think was 'my, that looks like fun.'

And before anyone says anything, I've watched them go right too - and it still sucks.

I think Schild is saying he wants Street Fighter/ Mortal Kombat/ Ninja Gaidain gameplay in his MMOs.  Instead of "Push button for riposote" you'd  ^ > < b+a on a gamepad.  Basic attacks on 'teh buttons'  & specials from button combos.

I'm old (ok not really) but without a real joystick those combos have always sucked, IMO. I'll stick with buttons, thx. 

I hope that's not what he's saying, because it's fucking retarded.

Imagine your 3 hour MC raid with that kind of shit.  Instead of pressing 7, you have a combo for backstab.  Your hands would BREAK after the first hour.

Let me expand the "I want a pony" philosophy a bit.

#1 most important point - I want my avatar to be a hero that does heroic things.  Killing an orc in solo combat is not heroic when there are 15000 orcs standing around staring at the sunset, so story and motivation are important for this.  Cutscenes aid this greatly, in engine is fine.  (Legendary World Class Athelete, Bruce Lee, Achillies, Lancelot, Superman all rolled into one)

#2 If I craft something I want to do it as a hero would,  Feanor creating the Silmarils not a_blacksmith00 shoeing a horse.  I don't have to start there but I do have to end up there.  And seriously, 3000 other players all making the Silmarils isn't heroic either.  User tools to do custom artwork would be nice.  Custom meshes would be better.  Attaching scripts and effects to my custom designed stuff would be godlike.  (Rennaisence Man master of the arts and sciences, philosopher, engineer, artist, scientist)

#3 Player housing.  If I'm lord so-and-so in a game then there better damn well be castle so-and-so complete with men-at-arms, a sleepy village so-and-so and various interesting things to do there.  This is mine, not the guilds, not some abortive attempt at a forced social construct.  If I want to have a house in the city (guild or otherwise) then I should be able to do that too. There should be some reason here for me to interact with other players.  Trade would be nice. Military alliances, better.  Invasions of me or of others by the AI or by players would be interested but only when I want to participate. (King of the World, Chairman of the joint chiefs. you get the picture)

#4  Exploration.  Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark, not a 12 year old getting to ride his bike to school by himself.

In otherwords every aspect of the game should be heroic in scope.  I'm playing this game as a fantasy break from the real world.

Murgos :  Thinking Big Since 1809.

I agree, but I wondering were the MMO part of his design is.  I think it's be more of an Elder Scrolls type of design.

Yeah, it does seem a little too 'if wishes were horses'.

Well, while I think one could argue the specifics of Murgos' post, the sentiment is the key. People want to be heroes - they want to feel important.

I think the old school of thought from many mmog developers was that players in mmogs are cogs in a wheel. They can't be heroes when there are 1000s of other players all trying to be heroes at the same time. You can see that in many of the designs.

The new school of thought (one that was building even before WoW) is that players WANT to be heroes regardless. So either find a way to give them the sense of being a hero or find yourself in a world of trouble. Being heroic doesn't just mean smashing monsters, saving princesses, and being the King. It means giving someone the sense in the game that they are important and that they are needed and appreciated. Again, I hate to bring up UXO since it got canned, but the very first sentence in our design document was "The player is the hero." That drove everything we did.

And I think that should be a driving factor in mmog design. We need to ask ourselves, "Does this make the player feel special, heroic, and important?" And if not, what can we do so that it does?

Perhaps it might be better to ask "How can we avoid getting canned this time."

For the mortgage and whatnot.

Haha, I guess that was a "burn". I'd love to answer that question but I'd probably get in a lot of trouble if I did. :)

I like this. It always bugs me that everything but item #65456345 from Loot table Delta disappears from a dead mob. Being able to break it down into crafting components (ala Guild Wars) is a good way to do it.

Sorry for not responding sooner to that but I was *busy* IRL :)

After having seen my brother-in-law (he used to make FPS maps for a living) go from one video game company to another year after year and after hearing the horror stories he told... My take on that subject is that the video-game industry is full of amateurs. That is in a good sense and a bad sense. We have the most dedicated people, the most talented and the most creative people but also the worst managers, the worst coders and the worst communicators...

While fun and entertainment might not be objectively assessed and measured in terms of budget and time, realization and testing of a MMORPG core mechanics can certainly be.

So many MMORPGs have failed in the game engine and game mechanics department that it's not even funny as it is probably the majority of the MMORPGs out there. So many have failed in the realistic deadlines department that it is still hurting.

WoW is both good news and bad news. They have shown that making a MMORPG a successful and profitable game is possible IF given the proper amount of money and time. Any capital risk will look at the numbers and will probably seal the fate of some original projects, and on the other hand, they will be ready to shell out the money for bigger projects because they know "it can be done".

d

AC1 had (and probably still has) something in that vein.

Merely jest.  No offence intended, of course.

I think what he's saying is more like God of War combat instead of like Street Fighter combat. I agree, Street Fighter combat would wear you out pretty quickly. I think what he's getting at is the next gen consoles assume you've got a broadband connection, so we can finally have packet streams that are > 4kps or whatever the acceptable 'kinda playable for people on modems' limit is now.

I always think back to playing the first dungeon in Zelda 2 when I was young. Zelda 2 is the overhead map / side scroller when you get to the action one. In the first dungeon, on your way to get the key to open up the 2nd half of the dungeon,you fought these orange knights who could attack high and attack low. They could also BLOCK high, and block low. You could do the same. What I remember about this is that it was more challenging to defeat one of those knights, in '89 or whenever that was, than it is to defeat a level 58 stone gargoyle in WoW. I believe if I fired up Zelda 2 via rom right now, that will still hold true.

I think I would rather have "low attack" "medium attack" and "high attack" and the ability to jump/block them rather than have an autoattack button and 10 different hotkeys to press to do different, special things. A "lock target" ability just to switch it to circle strafe mode around that target, but your slashes could still hit other things. Etc. I just think there is more to that kind of combat than my Defensive Warrior's old mantra of autoattack, bleed attack, sunder armor (repeat 4), shield bash, and mash on the Revenge hotkey so I get a free shot in every 5 seconds when I block/parry/dodge.

I've always liked this idea too.  Back in my sphere/RunUo days I used to code in true assembly/disassembly recipes for all my items.  The better the skill the more finished components they could unwrap.  The trick of course is to balance it all so that farming loot for resources is not more rewarding that gathering to begin with.

Hey, if your not watching where your going you are just going to end up going in circles.  I guess it's the era of when I started playing games but to me the concept of an MMO is real people replace the NPC's.  The problem is that people don't want to be dirt farmers or spawn camped for thier phat lewts.

I like this a lot.  Does anyone remember the part in Final Fantasy 3 where you had to build 3 full parties out of your entire roster of characters, and move them down 3 different paths that all occurred in the same dungeon?  One party would have to pull the lever that would open the door for the second, and so forth.  Give me something like that, but with the production values and "Whoa, cool!" factor of the Deadmines in WoW.  (Because the bar has been raised, and anything less than those production values is now strictly second rate, you got that?)  I want the group that's on the floor above me to push down a boulder that splatters the big ugly ogre that my group would otherwise have had a very hard time with, stuff like that.

And when everyone comes together at the end, give them a boss who's challenging and interesting, not just time-consuming.  Give me a boss that teleports, that doesn't want to stand toe-to-toe, that makes himself invisible, that summons help.  If the abilities to thwart teleportation, reveal the invisible, and so forth are well-distributed throughout your player classes, and if putting those abilities to their best use requires more strategic thinking than just holding down a hotkey, you're going to have a much more interesting battle than we're used to.

Nija's on the right track with the analogy regarding the orange knights in Zelda 2.  Those guys were fun because they could counter any (well, more like both) of your attacks, and you could counter theirs, forcing you to 'fence' with them a bit.  So far no MMO has given us that sort of enemy.  They keep giving us enemies with no fencing ability, just a load of hitpoints and a willingness to keep running into our swords for hours on end.

Ive played slash-em up/platformers for 3 hours, God of War, Devil May Cry and even the old Rune game for the PC come to mind. Ive also played Soul Cali 2 and Street Fighter for hours too.

I want a mmo fighting game, or a mmo fps, mmo platformer or mmo er.... "GTA". The mmorpg genre is dead to me.

Guild Wars does have a pretty nice crafting system.  I especially like how you can break a weapon to get a component to put directly onto another weapon, instead of having to craft something completely new out of it.

I'm guessing that the answer to Ironwood's question is probably "Don't work on an MMOG for EA."

Also, WindupAtheist, who are you and what have you done with our myopic turd burglar?

Schild has ranted about "hotkeys" before, I didn't get it then and I don't now.  Please explain.

I think schild is saying that if he wants to garrotte someone, instead of pushing the 4 key for garrotte, he wants to actually perform some actions that feel more like he's performing actions instead of hitting one button. He wants to feel like an actor, not a pellet-puncher.

For example, take the Splinter Cell games. In those games, you can pick certain locks, but it's a mini-game of sorts. It's not a horribly complicated mini-game, but it gives tactile feedback (through the force feedback controller) and it isn't just "Hit my lockpick key and sit back." When you want to interrogate someone, you have to sneak up behind them, and at just the right moment hit your attack button to place your gun against their skull, put your arm around their neck and get the option to interrogate them (or shoot them). It's combination of buttons that make the player feel like he's doing something, like a participant, instead of making him feel like a barely active viewer. Hotkeys are very passive forms of gameplay.

Um, no.  I regularly, when PvPing, have to press 1,2, 5, 6, combo points, 4, 7 vanish.

Now imagine that everyone of those numbers was a combo ITSELF.  Multiply it by seven.  Add it every ten seconds for 3 hours.

FUCK THAT.

Combat would have to be slowed down GREATLY in order to make that kind of gameplay feasible. You couldn't just drop that into WoW and have it work.

I'm having a good day, I suppose.

Speaking of EA, I'd really like to see the developer known as Leurocian hired onto a project with promise.  Between "paragon" boss monsters, their shiny (but not TOO uber) loot, and the massive AI upgrade he apparently masterminded just before leaving UO, he's shown an ability to graft fun, well-conceived systems onto even an old and senile game.  I'd like to see what he could do on a game with money and a future.

Oh, and some more rambling concerning "smart" bosses:  It's not really a monster-smarts versus player-smarts.  The players are always going to be smarter than anything you can code into an MMORPG.  It's a matter of encounter complexity versus group coordination.  If the evil wizard lord can teleport, and turn invisible, and summon demons to help him, and if those demons are operating on AI at least marginally more complex than just trying to tank the nearest player, then you have an encounter complicated enough to challenge eight people scattered around the country who are trying to type and fight at the same time.

Yes, a praticed and well-coordinated group is going to be able to go in there and own him.  That's fine.  They have a right to win if they have their shit together, I suppose, and trying to stop them is just going to make things unplayable for everyone else.  At least in this case you have the game dominated by well-oiled groups who can work together, and not catass zerg guilds.

My point was I wanted to see a decent mmog that wasnt an rpg, not a wish for stupid control methods used in the next generation of eq clones.

You can still have a massive persistant world in which combat and gameplay doesnt revolve around rolls of the dice and other methods ripped from PnP games of the 80s.

You wanna know how to beat Blizzard? Make Warcraft crossplatform for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 and have it have Zelda like gameplay. Then tell me it's retarded. The Worst Worst Worst console games sell more than most PC Games these days.

By the way, hitting "1" and watching the character attack isn't fun. There's only one thing on a computer that should make my character attack - the mouse buttons.

What I was saying is that the core system underlying most MMOGs is so fundamentally not fun that they'd have to rewrite that before it would even be worthwhile to go pie in the sky. Thing is, most developers are probably "content" with those systems.

And now having read this page - Ironwood - fuck 3 hour raids. Fuck them, right in their ass. They shouldn't exist. Stop using that as a counterpoint. They are the extreme of catassing dickheads winning zee games through having no life.

Tetris is more involved and has a more appropriate control scheme than MMOGs.

I am so not going to play any computer game that has me gyrating calisthenics.  That's what hoop and tennis are for... maybe a biofeedback game like Wild Divine (http://www.wilddivine.com/).

'm not so sure jaded consolers are any better a focus group than hardcore devs who want both "to develop the game they would play" and have it sell more than than robot jesus.

Schild tell me more of these Japanses only MMO's (pm if you must) and how I can play them.  I liked front mission for what it was worth and I love robots..

Also hotkey combat is shit.  Even a barely fps system ala Hellgate sounds lightyears ahead, the points about Zelda were brilliant and how much drool was there about Mount&Blade?  There are much better ways to design combat then giving everyone a hotbar and having them drag their stupid skills onto it.  DAOC tried to make a decent system with their positionals and skillchains but lets move on already.

You guys are having decent ideas about pvp, all I ever asked for in WoW was instead of stupid "fake" instanced battlegrounds all those so-called contested zones were actually contested.  If HB or SS was razed to the ground every day instead of a game of pointless tug-of-war being played there.  Or perhaps if Graveyards could be captured, or just adding all the types of things they have in battlegrounds to the actual gameworld I would have kept playing.

Let me dig a bit, I'll do some research and make a thread about games only available in the land of the rising sun. But let me say - I have much hate for Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine not coming out in America.

Edit: Actually, it's worthy of an article whatwith us going into post-mortem on this generation of games. Give me a couple days.

Er, you're obviously not following my other posts....

Edited to Add :  And I think you're wrong Period.  You're coming at this from a console perspective which I don't think is valid anyways...

And, I contest, if you're doing that, I don't know what fucking game you're playing, but it isn't WoW.

Put it to you this way Ironwood. In the Perfect Game(TM) people shouldn't be able to write script bots that do the same series of attacks over and over on every monster type and come out alive 98% of the time.

Having setup a wow rogue bot or 4, you see the downfalls of the system pretty quickly.

That's fine. I'm sorry 90+% of the gamers in the world don't give a flying rats ass about computers and at this rate I'll be among them within a year or two. My computer at the moment serves as a console for real time strategy games and first person shooters. In fact I have a seperate PS2 hooked up to the monitor that I can switch over to when I actually want to play GAMES. Your future of spreadsheet wars is bleak, and I'm sorry your hands get tired after playing a console game for 3 hours. But the problem doesn't lie with me. People want to know how to beat Blizzard. Beat them where they don't exist. Consoles. No one has been able to beat Blizzard in the past on the PC and it isn't going to start with SOE, NCSoft, Webzen, Turbine, Funcom, Mythic or whoever. It just won't fucking happen. Their vision of the future is plagued with tunnelvision. At this point the only ones who stand a chance out of that group are Webzen with games like Huxley on the 360 and even then they Must Get Microsoft to release a Keyboard/Mouse for it since it's an FPS. But what do I know, Halo 2 sold hojillion copies.

Edit since you responded twice: Stop being a douche. I can only assume you suck ass at console games from what you've said because describing MMOG combat as "hitting 1 and waiting to attack" is what is known as exaggeration. Unfortunately it's not very exaggerated.

Align yourself behind dragon and press 1,2,2,2,4,1,3,2,1,4,2,8,2,1,1 (rpt for 20 minutes)

vs

Run up behind dragon, leap on to its rear leg, jump off a spur and climb up its back, run up the spine, position yourself on its head, ride it as it bucks about, charge up your sword with the appropiate button, activate the right skill, bring the sword down into its skull, leap off the dying dragon as it falls, and greet your group, the crossbow man whose been sending bolts into its mouth, some magic guy doing something creative *,   the sword guy slashing at the tendons on its legs and some pointy eared chick whose been firing off heals and positioning shields and wards on the others.

*If you want a decent application of magic in a non rpg game think about HL2s physics mod and whats its capable of.  Lassoes, cages, shields, manipulation of surroundings, telekinesis to stop damage to your group etc and not a fireball in sight.

Penfold just covered something I was going to address regarding "epic bosses".  Fight a dragon in DAoC and basically you walk up to it until you're close enough to attack, then you just keep on attacking.  There's no strategy to that- it's /stick and autoattack, throw in a style when you can.

The problem is that the dragon is basically intangible.  You can walk right through it.  Therefore, there's no strategic positioning.  You don't have to do it with every damn monster, but in the case of giant huge stuff like that LET players use movement to their advantage.  Let a player run up a dragon's back and attack its eyes- make the eyes separate targets that, when taken out, cause the dragon to miss more frequently and lose access to some powerful attacks.  Make the neck a separate target that, when damaged enough, removes fiery breath.  That kind of thing.  Think outside the box, don't jsut make it "/stick, autoattack".  That's not fun.  It's not epic.  It's not interesting.  It's killing a rat outside the newbie town, but this time the rat is bigger, does more damage and has a lot of hit points.  And you need 40 people to have a chance.

As for Schild's point-
Something to consider, look at Vampire: Bloodlines.  Using a weapon, click to attack once and you'll swing the weapon in one direction.  Click to attack again and you'll swing it back in the other direction.  A third time and you'll generally perform some sort of uppercut attack that knocks the enemy away.  That's all with one button- standard attack.  Why do all attacks in MMOGs have to be completely separate from other attacks?  CoH is particularly guilty of this (though maybe that proves that this isn't so important, since COH combat is so lauded).  My martial artist can perform a Thunder Kick, followed by a Crane Kick, followed by a Storm Kick.  Or he can do Storm Kick, Crane Kick, Thunder Kick.  Or Crane, Thunder, Storm,  Etc etc.  But the order doesn't matter or do anything.  The animations aren't different at all.  Even something as simple as "Well Storm Kick leaves you in a stance ideal for performing a Thunder Kick, so Thunder Kick animates faster than normally if you use that to follow up Storm Kick, but because Storm Kick hits an enemy in the head they're not ready for or expecting a sudden powerful blow to their torso so their guard is down and a Crane Kick following a Storm Kick would do a bit more damage"  would make things a lot more interesting.  Throw in some combos- logical ones.

CoH is starting to do this a bit with combined elements.  The new Trick Arrow set includes an "Oil Slick" power which drops oil on the ground slowing enemies and making them fall down.  Players can hit the oil slick with a fire attack to light it up and burn enemies within it.  In a recent "Ask a dev" session, one of the designers was saying he hopes they can do more stuff like that- like fire attacks would evaporate ice causing a mist with its own effects, or if they add water powers then electricity hitting that would electrocute all enemies in its range, etc etc.

To paraphrase John Donne, "No attack is an island."  Let them interact with one another in logical, fun, and unique ways.  This goes deeper than "this attack debuffs defense so it's good to use first" because that affects all other attacks in the same way.  It creates a "always open up with this attack" situation rather than a strategic situation.  Maybe one combination of attacks does more damage so a player usually does that but another combination has a better chance to land and can debuff defense so the player would use it against an enemy who's hard to hit.  Maybe an enemy has resistance to damage so that any given attack can do no more than 5% of his max health in damage so it's in the players' interest to use the chains that allow attacks to cycle the fastest rather than looking for the biggest hits.  Maybe another enemy subtracts 40 damage from every attack he takes so players want to use combinations to create the biggest hits they can rather than cycling low damage fast attacks.

And, like WUA said, go outside just combat mechanics.  Maybe an enemy teleports.  Maybe someone can counter that.  Maybe the enemy flies around so you want someone with the ability to bring them down.

Getting killed at work, but here you go (I'm sure I left a lot out, but I am long-winded enough). 

Start with WoW and give me...

1.  More.  More is the main thing I want.  I want more content.  More great single group dungeons, more great raid targets, more great solo quests, and I want them added more frequently.  I want more interesting/funny NPCs wandering around.  I want more cool-looking nooks and crannies.  I’d pay a lot more if you gave me a lot more stuff. 

2.  An even better handcrafted vs cut-and-paste ratio.  WoW is pretty good here, but there is room for plenty of improvement.  I know that we’ll never have every table and chair handcrafted by an artist, but the cut-and-paste caves and buildings grate on me.  Also more expensive.

3  Equally campy but less cartooney graphics (this is purely aesthetic and I am probably not expressing myself well, but I prefer the aesthetic ideals of the original EQ [which I call “campy-realism” which is a term I made up, perhaps there’s a real word for it?] to WoW [“campy cratooney”] or EQ2 [“welcome to the uncanny valley”].

4.  More consistent scale to content.  WoW has 5 person zones, 10 person zones, 15 person zones, 20 person zones, and 40 person zones.  This is hard on guilds.  If you build your roster to have 40 online and you do the 20-man, people are left out (and because you need certain roles, you can’t always just do 2 groups).  Same with 20 vs 15, etc.  I’d like just 2 sizes.  Group and raid.  For groups I think anything from 4-8 would work.  For raids, WoW’s 40 feels about right.  Maybe 30.  Enough that it takes some real skill to get everyone flowing and reacting as one person, but not the mammoth 72-man EQ1 raid where most people felt unimportant.  Also enough so you can have a nice-sized guild with some sub-groups without having to leave too many people on the sidelines when raids hit. 

5.  Robust serverwide and cross-server communication.  Like EQ1 has/had.

6. Voice-to-text.  I like the somewhat more twitchy and definitely more demanding nature of WoW’s high end game vs EQ.  But this demands quick communication while your fingers are occupied, which means typing doesn’t work so well.  You also lose the ability to shoot the breeze, which is really one of the main reasons to play.  I find voice communication to be immersion-breaking and cuts me off from the real world too much (with headphones on, I can’t talk to my wife or listen to the radio while playing).  Voice comm also sucks in large groups, because everyone cannot talk at once.  Voice-to-chat seems to me the ideal solution.

7.  More incentive to socialize throughout your character’s career.  For much of the game, WoW’s mechanics actively punish you for grouping.  Naturally, people don’t group that much through those patches.  Soloing should be viable, but grouping should almost always provide faster advancement (even including set-up time).  Socialization is what makes these games tick, and WoW could use more of it. 

8.  Harder, more demanding raids.  WoW’s raids are pretty demanding, and we’ve come miles and miles from Vox, Trakanon and Vulak.  The new 20-man dungeon is flat-out awesome.  Keep things going in this direction: more complex scripts requiring more things from every single person there.  More chaos from the enemy that requires more coordination from us to beat. 

9.  Related to 8.  Kill the UI mods that trivialize content.  Some of the mods in WoW are just out of hand.  Decursive, the CQ-style addons for almost every raid boss, etc are no fun for the players and they force the developers into an arms race where they design the next round of content assuming the players have those tools.  This is a hard line to draw, but it needs to be drawn.

10.  Skill customizability through gear (preferably) or quest/AA-type advancement, not talents/specializations/etc.  Balancing de facto subclasses is impossible, being permanently or semi-permanently stuck in one de facto subclass sucks, collecting gear that lets me effectively be one of a number of de facto subclasses depending on the situation doesn’t suck.

11. Appearance customization through fluff clothing and the like (I like almost all WUA’s ideas now that he has explained them, especially this one).  Some but all of which is tied to PvE or PvP achievement.

12.  Housing.  Non-instanced.  Primarily in cities though some could be spread out and a game-mechanic reason to go there.  Ways to decorate them, some but not all of which are tied to PvE or PvP achievement.

13.  PvP, I could take it or leave it.  But if you have it in your game, you need to prevent PvE advancement from determining PvP results (i.e. make PvP much less gear dependent than PvE).  You can already see this problem having two bad effects in WoW: on one hand, PvE gear does somewhat imbalance PvP, on the other hand the fear of making this problem worse is crippling the game’s PvE progression).

14. Itemization.  Caster itemization needs to work like melee itemization from the beginning.  WoW screwed the pooch badly on this.

15. The ability to raid in smaller chunks.  This goes for single-group dungeons too.  All the dungeons should have wings a la Scarlet Monestary/Dire Maul.  Trash mobs should not respawn in raid instances at all.

Oh, and on a side note:  I want in-game events, the outcome of which can be affected by the players.  The game should be built from the ground up to accomodate something along the lines of the Scenario System that Calandryll and friends had running in UO for a while there.  Damn those were cool.

Yes, this is going to take extra money and effort.  You're either a penny-pinching niche game, or you're breaking open the piggybank to try and go head-to-head with WoW.  Choose.  I'm not of the opinion that WoW is invincible, but you're sure as hell not going to beat it (or even compete with it) on the cheap.

Once again, challenging WoW is not a possibility. You can not challenge Blizzard. It's not in the cards. I don't care how much money you have. You simply have to walk around them. Fight them on a front from which they can't fight back.

I disagree, if I can slot my shotgun with chain lightning shells and an underslung grenade launcher in Hellgate:London I will never touch a Diablo game again... 

Oh and akimbo pistols too please.  Can WoW be beat?  I dont really know, I dont think any of these want lists that start with "Take WoW" are worth a damn though, because if I wanted WoW I'd just play WoW.  How about give me Conan with all the things they are talking about actually implemented and working well.  Not that that will ever happen but damn if it wouldn't be sweet.

Just to pipe in on the subject of housing - take a look at what AC1 did. Houses placed in designed towns - we should never again see the urban sprawl of UO. Also, the idea of multi person houses works, especially mansion/castle type.

Even WoW could probably currently implement some level of guild Castles without having to resort to instance housing, which in my oppinion is totally immersion breaking and negates the point of housing.

When I played AC Darktide I hunted by myself and I socialized in my guild town/mansion. The game gave you reasons to socialize outside of hunting, because the free for all PVP mandated that friends and guildies congregated together when not out grinding for the sake of common protection.

Maybe, maybe not.  But we're definitely going to find out, sooner or later.  Once WoW's total income starts being measured in BILLIONS with a B, all sorts of businesspeople who never knew WTF an MMORPG was before are going to take notice, and we're going to see some seriously weird shit.

I agree whole heartily.  Asherons Call should be remembered for what they did the first 2 years (ignore everything after the AC2 announcement).  The monthly events were totally gnarly, and the story archs all culminated into a single EPIC event.  Allow me to define EPIC.  Epic is managing to be in the .0001% who got into that group of 60 to take down a "raid" dragon.  EPIC is the fact that I could hop on, and group or not assist in something, well, bigger than my static path.

This requires hiring individuals though to manage such affairs.  UO did attempt to do this in various ways, and for the 4 to 5 people who got to partake in it I am sure it was satisfying.  I believe their mistakes as a whole could (should) be taken and used as a guide to all future games that are being built.  A short list off the top of my head (good and bad):

1. Open play is king, but repurcussions must be addressed.
2. Crafting should not be the end all, but a person should be able to function at the highest levels WITH crafted material.
3. Levels automatically define where a player stands.  This is good for some, but the majority will never get to the end game.  If you use levels, do not make it the center of your game.
4. EVERY central class should have some sort of "end game" viability.  It is ok to have some classes rock at PvP but suck at PvE.  But any core class that sucks at both will hinder end game enjoyment.
5. It is ok not to be combat centric.  No really, it is.
6. $$$ invested = Subscription #'s.  $$$ invest + philosphy majors = Japanese subscriptions.  Quiet the conundrum.

Going against the Goliath is death, I agree.  But who made the Goliath? 

Edit. Couple more additions.

7. If you have real estate ensure there is enough room for growth.  UO, for example, did not have this.  Do you really think Trammel was about PvP?  I guarantee if you went a bit deeper it was about people having no room to build.  I am surprised this does not come up more in discussions actually.
8. If you decide to make crazy drastic changes then fix the bugs ASAP.  Again the Trammel for example; people could summon blade spirits and EV's (2 powerful spell summoned creatures that the summoner could not control) all willy nilly; as long as they were in a guild.  It was insane seeing this, but it worked so everyone copied.  Far as I know it was never fixed and now everyone has millions.
9. Money drains.  Yes this is not real life, and we are operating on a flat economy, but this needs tempered with real perspective.  It should not be treated as if it was a controlled economy, money dumps should be strategically implemented, and in a logical manner.  Example: Everyday thread - Newbie price.  Hot pink neon super glowing thread?  Higher value.  Sounds simple but it really is hit and miss in these days (you will never evolve faster than the players). 

Okay, question for anyone reading:  Are we ever going to see another successful mass-market MMORPG that doesn't use a leveling system?  Other than maybe the next time Raph makes a game?  Or do people like their ding too damned much?

Because as much as I'd love to see a modern update of the UO skill system, I can't help but feel like a little bit of a deluded elitist, demanding that developers ignore the market and make the game I want to play.  Sure, I think levels suck, but they seem to hit some sort of crack-monkey compulsive gambler button in peoples brains.

Is there some huge difference between grinding up skills and grinding levels that makes one inherently more fun than the other?  They're both just character advancment systems that serve just about the same purpose.  You either put the time in to raise up a skill or you put the time in to raise up a level.  It's still just numbers going higher as you put more time in.

A brief thought on the housing thing.

I dislike virtual apartments because they lack visibility (which means you can't show off) and visitability (which means you can't have public spaces that are privately owned); I dislike pre-placed plots because they lack choice in location of where to live (you can't join a city that is full up; you can't choose a view that you like; you can't have an obscure cabin in the wilderness).

I dislike urban sprawl, though. It's sort of ironic that in SWG we calculated the amount of available space versus the amount of placeable houses, and ended up with 95% open land, and it's still considered to be urban sprawl. I suspect the issue is consistency of the openness; when you're "out there" you want to not come across a house. Is that accurate?

I DO like the idea of being able to get rent or build inside design-built cities. I still wish we had had that in SWG.

I like Horizons' solution. Land pre-set in reasonable places for cities to go. It's just that simple. Then you can leave it up to the players to fill in the map with cities and worry about things like CONTENT.

Funny enough, I liked Horizon's crafting system in terms of how you could customize your items.

Sure, your "Iron Sword +2" is exactly the same as any other Iron Sword +2, but you could change the handle, blade, handguard, etc.

Could drop a few "hermit" lots out there as well- a clearing in a forest, for example, could have a cabin.  But that would be the only one in the forest.  On one hand, that house is far more visible to players because of its uniqueness.  On the other, that house is placed FAR away from the rest of "civilization" (players generally aren't looking to buy stuff when they're out adventuring, and whether a house owner has to manually visit his/her home or can teleport directly to the house but nowhere else, the distance makes life less convenient- you can't just run to the neighbor's house to borrow a cup of sugar so you can finish making that +4 cake... or buy a piece of iron ore to finish off that last sword).

I do think that hermit houses could work if you give them the right feel- the distance is a real drawback, and the land won't allow another city to spring up nearby.  You could even have monsters attack it infrequently if you can set that up so that it never happens when the player isn't aware of it.  Perhaps the owner has to pay extra tribute to the forest creatures to get them to leave the place alone.  If the house is burned to the ground, that lot opens back up for someone else to claim it.

But even after all that, chances are that it's too unique and special, while MMOGs seem to want everyone to be exactly the same.  Imagine the community backlash if there were only 15 hermit homes per server.  *gasp*  But they're all taken!  That's not fair!  I want one!  So maybe this is one of those nice things that we can't have.

Seems like fun to me, though.  Work your ass off to get a decent reputation with the wilderness critters so they don't rip down your house the second you build it, prop it up, set up a nice little oasis in the desert/refuge in the mountains/cabin in the forest.  Achievers and Explorers would both go orgasmic.  Socializers would thrive on the visibility and reputation such a system would create.

But, again, it has to be limited.  1 per zone max, and I'd really say just 1 every few zones.  And it needs to be DEEP in the zone, not right at the entrance.

You know what I want in a MMORPG? The following:

Day 1, you log on. You find yourself in a big clearing with a bunch of other people. All you have is some shoes and clothing. Around you is a forest, and in the forest are some bad guys.

First thing you do is grab a stick and beat on a bad guy or something. He kills you. Then, a bunch of people team up and beat on a bad guy with their sticks, kill him, and one of them grabs his knife. With that knife you skin an animal, and start the process of making twine, bow strings, etc.

Over time you build fences, houses, then one day you manage to fight your way to a mine and from there you can start to create more advanced weapons. Etc etc...

That is what is meant by "explorer" gameplay. Exploring is not just wandering into a new zone. Exploring is discovering and creating, not just observing.

I've written up a pretty thorough design document on the evolution through the ages concept in an MMOG. Though death really isn't in the cards that early. It's more about excavation, architecture, and other alternatives to straight combat. It's pretty pie in the sky shit though, and I still hesitate to post fleshed out ideas on this website anywhere.

That was the one thing that really excited me about Dawn.  Ignore the fetuspults and negative ping code, I loved the idea that the world would be essentially empty - and it was 100% up to the players to decide how to build it - where cities would be, if there would be roads built to the nearest mine/harbour etc etc.  Hell, they were planning to institute a /pray command, so people could invent their own religions - the more people /prayed, the more powerful their religion became.

Of course, that may be just the pure voice of naievity, and I realise we can't have nice things, but I thought that idea would be fascinating to play and to watch and see how it evolves.

Yes, there is.
No, I haven't figured out what it is yet.

Schild, a little help?  You're a level-hater, right?


Please don't post things like this where Raph might see them.  He'll take one look and go "Yes! YES! It'll have oxen-breeding and pottery-making and player justice and it'll be GREAT!"  Then he'll run off to make Sitting In The Woods Online, and our chances of getting a real workable MMO out of him in the next five years will drop to nil.   :wink:

I hate any sort of level. Skill levels. Character Levels.

The only thing I don't mind levels in is actual spell/weapon types. That's to say - tiers. Like the Master Sword system in Zelda. Or Mario, Super Mario, Fire Flower Mario, Racoon Mario, Frog Mario, Tanooki Mario and Invincible Mario.

You'd get bigger support from me about dropping the hotkey system. I'd prefer the mouse-clicking fest of Diablo to hotkeys.

Awesome idea, but the most powerful religion would of course be something dumb as hell.  First Church Of Our Lady Burrito or something equally asinine.

(btw, for everyone on this forum, asinine is spelled with one S)

Hrm.  I'll think on it then.  Something to do with instantaneous micro-advancements, instead of a work/reward cycle.  In the meantime, screw this, I'm going to bed.

And people, quit talking about Dawn.  It doesn't even deserve to be mentioned as something that was once a potential game.  My sanity is at steak.

Um.  Once again you're hitting me right where I don't care.  My main point is that I don't yet think the maturity of online consoles will support what you think you need to do.  That's all.  It might be fine where you are to look around and see great games on console that you love and some online play options, but that's a far different proposition to what I see here; which is everyone with a PC and BB in the house and hardly anyone with online consoles.  It's about the marketplace, not what I personally think of gaming.

For what it's worth, yes, I have consoles, yes I play them and, yes, marathon sessions of Caliber happen in my household.  No idea where you suddenly start bashing my console hate strawman, but it's really, really silly.  My point was that to replace every move in WoW with a corresponding combo joystick move would be totally RSI Ass.  A point that only Haem seemed to follow.

Beat Blizzard where they don't exist, you say.  Don't be a noob.  Right now the market isn't ready for that competition, I say, and WHEN IT IS, they'll just come over there and beat you there too.  Rock and Roll racing FTW.

NB - I don't care.  Really.  Don't get in a tizzy about my posts if you really want to get so very, very, very pretentious - See "This is known as exaggeration, my good man, I own a message board dontcha know.  You peasant".

Heh.

Penfold - What game are you describing.  I am interested in it's views and wish to subscribe to it's newsletter.  Or are we just ONCE AGAIN playing the 'oooh, wishing I had a pony' game.

Final Fantasy XI proves that consoles can do what I want them to do. The only hurdle is the harddrive. Also, DOA2 Online was glorious and DOA4 sounds like it's going to have a full MMORPG feel. Housing with trophies, items and shit. Accessories you can get through winning teh moneyz in victory. It's good stuff.


If you think WoW with Zelda style gameplay would be ass, you're positively nuts. Get rid of the melee combat skills and base it on items and your own reflex skills. It would be love. I'd even play that on the Revolution controller.


The installed base of PS2s on the market is over 10 times the size of the entire MMORPG industry. There's room for competition and the market is ready. Publishers just aren't willing to drop the dollars into it - though with WoW dominating the PC end, they should be. Also, Rock n Roll racing? I don't know why you're calling me a noob, but it would take Blizzard a decade to make another MMOG.

But it's been proven time and time again that, with the right vision and the right people, throwing money at the problem makes it go away.

Blizzard HAS the right vision and people, as they've proved time and time again.  And now they have enough money to make global warming go away.

I'm not sure it would take them a decade if push came to shove.

Oh, and I put it to you that if you put Zelda style control on WoW you would still not play it.  And why on earth would people come to play a single player type game in a Mmorg environment.   It would be like having a birthday party and inviting the local Psychiatric ward.  And the problems inherint in the game would still be there.  I see them as threefold :  The Grind, the speed of play and, oh dear God, above all; THE OTHER PEOPLE.

Don't mess up my Zelda experience by putting Toban or Tigole in there.

Control and environment are secondary considerations for me (though perhaps not for you) at the moment.  I'm burned out on WoW not due to the control, since Rogue Combat IS a mini-game and a damn fun one, but due to the fact that I'm required to group at my level with LARGE amounts of total slap-dicks.  I'm hoping that D&D will combat this, since everything points to yes, but there it looks as if the combat and control will be a total dissappointment.

I dunno.  To be honest with you, and myself, you guys are all looking forward far too much whereas I'm sitting here thinking - well, this is where we are and we're gonna be here quite a while.

Nothing will change in the next five years, minimum.  The days of direct competition are gone and all we can hope for at this stage is some kind of niche revolution.

Hotkey, Hotkey, Hotkey, Finishing move. Whoop.

Other people claimed it was me, but it wasn't. Some people just don't like fun. I, on the other hand, do.

Ironwood, you should really be looking forward more, because really - that attitude is why the market is the way it is. People are comfortable and willing to plop down money for rehashed diku derived shit. I'm Not.

Except for the fighting, which will be as lousy as it ever was.  :-P

Anyway FFXI played pretty well with a PS2 controller. I think MMORPGs have fallen into a local minima as far as control. I mean, I look at screenshots of various games and I see a screen with 2 rows of 20 hotbar items each, 4 other random open windows - it's just crazy. And the cost to performance ratio is absurd.

In 1993 you could play Street Fighter 2 with a stick and 6 buttons, and the fighting there is far better than in any MMORPG. No menus, no hotbars. Or take a game like Tekken, where the movelist is very deep with just 4 buttons. The idea that you need hundreds of icons all over the place and F1-F50 to do someone is crazy.

MMORPGs tend to have a lot more breadth than depth in fighting. Like, I have "fireball" level 1-20, "ice blast" level 1-20, etc etc etc ad nauseam. It really makes me ill to look at screenshots of people with advanced UI setups - that's stuff I don't want to touch with a ten foot pole. The actual screen (you know, the thing you are supposed to be watching!) is almost an afterthought after all the junky icons and windows are thrown everywhere on top of it.

IMO these games would be a lot better off if, instead of offering 20 levels of 20 types of spells, offered a smaller but more refined movelist with some actual depth.

By depth what I mean is if you look at a game like Go, the rules are very simple, but the game is still hard to learn and be good at. Then there is checkers, which has more complex rules than Go but is a much simpler game in the actual playing. Just adding more stuff you can do doesn't make the experience any better, deeper, or more skillfull.

The combat in MMORPGs is for the most part not any deeper than stomping on goombas. The fact that it takes 40 icons onscreen is just insane.

40 Icons and less skill. You don't have to "aim" in an MMORPG. That word doesn't even exist in them yet.

When I played the E&B beta I was really amped until I actually got into combat. If that game had had real combat I would have probably loved it to death. I mean, it was really cool how I could customize my ship, outfit it with weapons and stuff...and then press A and auto-attack something to death, yeah! That's what I look for in ship to ship combat, sitting back and doing nothing.

BTW there are new screenshots of the Conan game. Pics of some guy slicing off some other guy's head. I think it looks pretty good actually. Very uncluttered screen, groups of enemies travelling in packs (guys riding evil elephant things and other guys milling around them). I think I'm actually looking forward to that because I thought AO was quite neat in some ways.

Ah, but is that active head-slicing or totally trivial graphical head-slicing ?

Schild - I'm Not either.  Apart from WoW I haven't bought a game in as long as I can remember.  The industry is fucked at the moment.  HL2 proved that to me (1 step forward, 2 steps back).  I plonked down for WoW and played it because I enjoyed it and it was fun.  Now, not so much.  Because of Raids.  Which, as we've done to death here, suck.

The only thing that anyone's had to say that's broke any fresh ground here is using the Real Physics for Magic, ala HL2.  Yeah.  Let's try that.  But I'm still not sure what you two are trying to say harking back to Street Fighter.  Really.

I thought Ravenholm (the village area - 3rd or 4th area into HL2) was 5 steps forward in terms of atmosphere and level design.

Half-Life 2 did lots of things very well. It did a couple things perfectly. It made a new weapon - the gravity gun - a cliche in less than 24 hours. But 2 steps back it was not. Doom 3 was two steps back.

The end result over a long period of time is the same -- it's how some games handle the shorter periods of time that can make skill advancement feel different than level advancement. With experience points and levels as long as you are getting experience you feel like you are progressing. With skill points, depending on the "granularity" of the advancement it can sometimes feel like you are standing still. E.g. you might spend an hour beating on monsters and not see your weapon or other combat skills go up at all. In the PnP world there wasn't an easy way of fixing this without requiring a lot of book keeping. With computers the book keeping is not an issue so you can you can fix this problem in CRPGs by increasing the frequency of skill increases while decreasing the amount of each skill increase (i.e. allow for fractional point increases). Some CRPGs, however, still use(d) PnP-style skill point systems where skills only go up in increments of whole points (EQ was like this, for example).

Another more subtle difference between level-based games and skill-based games is that with skills you often end of doing strange things just to raise certain skills which can make the gameplay feel "artificial". Macroing is obviously one such technique. To give another more long-winded example, the Defense skill in EQ was not an easy skill to raise unless you were a tank class. If you weren't you probably weren't getting beat on enough to max your Defense skill for your particular level. What some people did to work around this problem was to duel a Magician who was roughly the same level (you couldn't get combat skill point increases from fighting things that were too low level). The Magician would summon a weak hitting pet (a la the Earth pet), the person needing the Defense skill raises would turn his or her back to the pet (to limit parries and blocks), and the Magician would sic the pet on that person. After a long while of getting beat on you might or might not get a skill point increase.

Nope, again I'm gonna argue with you because I'm at work and bored as fuck :  DOOM3 didn't even acknowledge steps.  There were no steps.  It was like, let's take the original doom and slap some art on.  And, you're right, it sucked fucking donkeys.  Couple it with 'black screen TM - FOR IMMERSION' and you've got a right fucking stinker.

I think the original halflife already had atmosphere and level design OUT THE ASS.  So long as you ignored Xen.  Which I liked...  But what made HL2 such a dramatic dissafuckingpointment was the enormity of the suckitude of the AI.  That's where it went two steps back.  The rest was adding graphics and more imersion and better levels, but if you fill them with PUDDING HEADS who you wade through, then what's the fucking point ?

I wanted to be flushed out with grenades again.  I was ready for them this time.  Instead I got to shoot them in the face while they shuffled two steps right and then two steps left.  Fuck that.

But I do enjoy our conversations.

See, I didn't care much for Half-Life 1 at all. I think Deus Ex did more for that genre. But this is about MMORPGs. And the only thing that's been shown to me in that sector of gaming is that WoW is the perfect iteration of Diku+Graphics and has proven that the entire idea is beautiful in theory and sucks knob in execution. The premise should be fun on paper. But rarely is - and when one part of it is finally fun (as is the case in the exploration of WoW, or the crafting of Horizons, or the economy of SW:G, etc) the rest of the game bites ass. The economy and crafting in WoW is Meh/Uninspired at best. Everything except the crafting in Horizons is an abortion, and the economy of SW:G fell to the complete drooling retardness that is your generic MMORPG gamer.

I hold the "don't treat your players like retards" flag high. Go freak power. Unfortunately your average player is retarded. And WoW is perfect for them.

That is what is known as a stalemate within a genre. The MMORPG genre is stagnant and boring. Companies won't fund new/interesting ideas unless they think it can make more money than WoW because the people with the money are tunnel-vision morons. And when something interesting finally does get made (ATiTD, Eve, Starport, etc) the production is such ass due to a lack of budget that even the most non-judgemental and accepting MMORPGer can't bring themselves to play it and the game will forever remain niche.

So Raph, I finally have my list for you. It's really easy and I'd like to think you can do it.

1. Prove me wrong¹.




¹[in actions, not words].

Um.  I agree with your Stagnant and Boring paragraph, but I think you're personalising your views of WoW far, far too much (as usual, since you seem to hate it.)

I paid my 80 fucking dollars and got a sped up version of goddamn Everquest with the exact same endgame and battle animations that didn't even compare to the one year old at the time City of Heroes. Fuck that.

The art book is nice.

WoW needs housing.

Yes.  Imagine a rural area with houses placed on 10 or 20 acres of land; you're still among civilization.  If it were me, I'd suggest a mix of strategies - but I have the luxury of not having to worry about costs.  For example, I would say that for city areas, you have pre-set building plots.  Build whatever house you like on your particular plot of land, so long as it fits within the boundaries.  That might mean you only get some sort of row house, or no back yard.  Hey, you live in the city - you're paying for location.  The "suburbia" around a town (tent camp, castle's village, whatever fits) is just a housing zone.  Sort of UOish, you can place anywhere, up to whatever building size limits apply.  Throw in a few housing zones outside this area if there are particular spots you want to be housing-enabled.  Beyond that, have the ability to setup your own town.  Something SB-like, where you drop a ToL ("city deed", or whatever) and it allows for housing around it.  Limit the number of such deeds. 

You wind up with some flexibility, mostly empty land, and a few different types of options for players depending on what they want to do. 

Yeh, its theoretical, but its based on existing games, which is quite important. The assumption is of course, suitable technology, and suitable control method.

Run up behind dragon, leap on to its rear leg, jump off a spur and climb up its back, run up the spine, position yourself on its head, ride it as it bucks about, charge up your sword with the appropiate button, activate the right skill, bring the sword down into its skull, leap off the dying dragon as it falls, and greet your group - God of War (climb over boss bit), Thief, Jedi Knight series, Rune, Mario, Devil may Cry

the crossbow man whose been sending bolts into its mouth - FPS games. As someone whose played a ranger/hunter I dont want to stand 1 ft from a monster the size of an office block (or inside its model), hit fire, and then get told I missed.
 
some magic guy doing something creative * - HL2 physics mod and the like

the sword guy slashing at the tendons on its legs - Jedi Knight, God of War, Rune, Soul Calibur, Zelda, Devil May Cry etc

some pointy eared chick whose been firing off heals and positioning shields and wards on the others - HL2 physics mod, FPS games.

Take the skill points in WoW.  You swing your sword at a monster and sometimes your sword skill goes up, so maybe now it's 184 instead of 183.  Is that kind of micro-advancement any better than levels?  Is grinding up my lockpicking skill better than grinding xp?  It all seems pretty much the same to me, as any form of character advancement be it levels, skills, or loot, are all just a matter of how much time you invest in your character.

You know, I must admit, lockpicking is a bug bear of mine.

I want lockpicking as it was in the old Gold games, or in Thief3 - summat that I have to phsyically do myself.  Sure, give me better lockpicks which give me more time, or a skill that goes up the more I do it, but the actual act of lockpicking I like much.


Sigh.

I'm never happy, am I ?

Well sure I want that game too - nothing I would love more than to play out that scene in Starship Troopers and run all over the pathing grid of a moving mob/Artillery Beetle.

(http://www.film.org.pl/images/magia/starship.jpg)

But that's got nothing to do with console vs. PC or a keyboard '1-2-3' vs. console 'X,O,<twiddle>'.  I think too many of you all are confusing platforms/marketing with compelling game mechanics.  The fact we haven't yet seen these sort of cool mechanics is simply that the technology curve isn't quite there yet.  Yes the engineers/devs should be pushing that curve.  But none of that has anything to do with MMOGs, consoles, PCs, keyboards, controllers, or your left foot.

Yes and no.  'A house" isn't urban sprawl..  The exact same house as every other one on the planet, in a new and unique location is.  Having only a few key planets you could build on was also a bit of a bugger.  (I don't recall anyone going to moons except RPers because they were a PITA to get to.  Moon>planet1>planet2>moon. Not to mention that made NO sense from a space travel standpoint.  It was worse than flying the Airlines. but I digress.)

Also, since cities were the hub of activity a lot of the complaints in the early game were that you had this 100m raidus around the 'starting cities' that was empty and then you'd hit the end of that invisible wall and BAM tons of houses.  I realize you all wanted people to spread-out, but that was the most blatant example of an immersion killer in the whole game.  

 If people want to spread out they will, so long as travel isn't a pain in the ass.  It was for a LONG time because running was the only method.. so cities formed fairly close together.   However, easy travel also means waaaay too many people sprout up on that 'unique' spot on the beach you'd explored to, so it's a two-edged sword.  

Then on top of that you have the layer of harvesters.  Huge fields of mechanical devices everywhere across the planet, usually only a few hundred meters between one field and the next.   I don't recall seeing such fields of moisture vaporators on the Skywalker farm, because it'd deplete the resources too quick.  Gameplay vs griefplay, I suppose.

  Sprawl was even worse if one of the 'rich' veins of that week happened to be in or around a housing plot.   I remember quite vividly stepping out of my house one login to discover a field of loud, noisy heavy ore harvesters surrounding me.  Glee.   Giving the players 10 lots was good.. disallowing them to 'buy up' the lots surrounding their new home to create some kind of yard with the remainder was bad.  Heck, doing so would have allowed 'families' to create estates.  Instead their 'mansion' had another 'mansion' 15' away in the great Texas cluster suburb tradition.  (Production housing in Texas currently follows a 45'-50' wide lot with a 35-40' house planted on it.  This makes for fantastic urban sprawl and wonderful scenarios where you look out your picture window into your neighbor's bathroom. )

Can you guys just invent a new genre?

I want my MMORPG lazy and slow, with minimal involvement.  If I wanted a twitchy game that requires concentration, I'd play counterstrike.

(http://www.cartoonsforum.com/Kevs/Art/TroBugs.JPG)

Priceless.

This is way off topic but this is what I was messing with in HL2 last night. -

http://media.putfile.com/mexi_container and if that doesn't work, a direct link is http://s2.putfile.com/videos/25723563817.avi.

A combination of http://www.garry.tv/garrysmod/ + http://www.garry.tv/garrysmod/reaperswe/

Eventually I'd like to try Wooden Wars (http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=34256) but my vehicle creation skills aren't that great yet.

This horse is long dead. I know you want to believe that WoW has ruined MMOGs for ever, but saying it in every thread doesn't make it so. Good games and successful games have not stopped progress in the past. What is making it less likely that big bucks get pumped into original ideas has nothing to do with games or ideas out there, but polarisation in the industry. Just as with the music industry, there have been a huge spate of mergers and aquistitions recently which has left us very dependant on tiny underfunded labels for original ideas. It has nothing to do with WoW, and everything to do with EA and Vivendi.

And you can't type "Thy pantaloons are ablaze." with a D-pad either.

Taking WOW, the big thing I'd like is more incentive to group at the low end other than instances. Right now, you're pretty actively penalized for grouping. I'd like more small group things higher on as well, but it seems like they're hearing that now.

Crafting? Crafting is hard because if you make it meaningful, you take the hatred players have towards the devs and double it, with half directed at crafters and half directed at the devs. The phat loot squad hates crafters more than anything. I love the whole crafter dependent, run your own little shop, thing in SWG, but most players seem to really hate it. I don't know how you balance. I don't think you can. At least in WOW I can craft and sell some things without other players denouncing me as a predator and denouncing the devs for letting me be one. It's not a bad system. It also gives you at least some ability to use/sell items before you reach "the end game."

Housing? I'd love to see some housing added to WOW. And yes, absolutely, AC1 got it right. It was perfect. Everything from little villages in the right places to a few lone and very expensive "hermit" plots to the instanced apartments so the have-nots could have something too. And enough upkeep that you needed to care to keep your house, but not so much that it was impossible or burdensome. That also requires an absurdly large world though.

Skill/Level. I really prefer level systems because I have had better experiences with them. I don't grind. I don't ever want to grind. I just play the game and with a level system I advance and if I get bored I quit. In UO combat skills were fine because it went up as I killed things. Yes, I knew to hunt earthies to max my gains just like I know to get into sarnak groups in LOIO to xp in EQ. But I was actually playing. On the other side is taming in UO. The single most miserable experience I've ever had with advancement in a game. The basic game action of a tamer is to use a pet in combat. To raise the skill though, you go to some bizarre place and repeatedly tame and release the same creatures for hundreds of hours. Skill systems seem to end up with a lot of division between "playing" and "skilling." I think WOW's talent system is a pretty good compromise. I liked Shadowbane's system too, I felt like I had options in how to build a character. And big plusses for allowing more than one base class to feed into the same end class (mage/assassin, thief/assassin). You need to have respecs available though if you're going to have people picking and choosing skills within a class.

Graphics. I like cartoony like WOWs. I liked THERE's graphics for a less "camp" cartoony feel even more.

Players hated it in SWG because crafters price gouge.  In SWG the tradeskill Catasses made it to the end of the crafting mill in a week or two by exploiting the factory XP mechanics. They then were the exclusive outlet for ANY products for a good while, letting them amass huge fortunes.  Those fortunes then let them buy-up all the best resources as others caught-up, so now they were STILL the only outlet for the best product.  It's a fully free-market economy with no protections to the consumer outside of /petition.

Plus, since they're crafter catass their hours /played meant they became one of the only reliable sources.  It sucked to go someplace and not see an item you wanted on the vendor, so you learned who sold the boadest products and bought from them, despite the inflated prices.

Then, as a further kick in the nuts to combat types, if devs see a lot of money changing-hands or too much money in the economy they turn-down the 'faucet' which directly affects the combat players more than the crafters due to equipment wear & tear and the costs of HAM wounds.  Crafting prices dropped, but they were slower than the rate the income decreased.

There's one major problem with this - it only works for that first group of people. If I join the game two months after it starts, I don't get that newbie experience you had, and it might as well just be any other game.

As I've said before, the biggest problem in WoW isn't even that it's hard to type in these situations, it's almost as hard to READ the text in these situations. I miss guild chat often because I'm focusing on what's happening in the window. Unlike EQ1, I don't have to ever look at (and don't) my combat spam, I can tell what's going on from the onscreen action. Reading the guild/party chat is a separate distraction. The popup bubbles WoW has added don't seem to work as well as they should for this.

Voice comm with sound fonts (to aid immersion) and some form of prioritization options (allow a raid leader to override every other voice at any time, etc.) is really the way to go. But the problem isn't just that there are too many voices, because even our hearing in real life would have problems tracking all the voices we'd get in a full-on voice comm system in a 40-man raid.

Ok, so Schild - you don't want leveling in any form - skills or levels. So essentially you want to remove the ding,gratz! from the game. It could be done, but you'll have to provide a whole lot of something else to inspire people to keep playing. The problem I see with removing levels right now, is that levels are what determine where you can go in the game.

Designers currently build area of the game based on what level of character will adventure there. Without that, I can see one of two results.

1) All areas of the game can be accessed by anyone, which really kind of spoils any accomplishment of making your way in to a new area or "stage" of the game.
 or
2) The game design forces you to progress through areas one after another, which gives you a progression, but also makes the game feel like a train ride - which is probably even worse.

I'll throw in another comment on what I'd like to see taken from WoW and expanded on - differing storylines. Right now, you get dramatically different stories based on if you start as Undead, Human, Elf, etc. The game however, in the name of not preventing people from playing together, pretty much lets anyone do any of the story lines within thier Good/Evil faction.

WoW achieved something by seperating the population in to two factions like that, in that you can restart as the other side and have a whole new experience. I'd like to see that expanded on though - Don't make things quite so black and White. Have core quests and plots that only Undead can do, but also have over arching plots that different races can group together for. There should be more over arching quests in total, but give each race its own specific plots.

Then, give us branches within our plots. I'll use WoW for example. I'm a human Paladin in Westfall - I go smash the Defias Brotherhood and feel all happy. Yay for me. Or, I'm a human rogue in Westfall. Why can't I join the Defias Brotherhood and make fat loots? Don't force me to do something bad like that, maybe I'm a good hearted rogue that want to do nice things, but don't force me down that path - give me some options.

Why are you watching the combat window in WoW?

Actually, I think you got a sped-up version of goddamn Dark Age of Camelot, since the game really takes more inspiration from DAoC than EQ, IMO. Of course, since DAoC was just a slow-footed version of EQ with faction-based, zone-restricted PVP, it's a mostly correct statement.

Nothing a good reverse auction system wouldn't have fixed.  Most MMOGs economies do not allow goods/market flow.  The way to bring the two playstyles together is to let buyers post a reverse auction for what they need and the amount they'll instantly accept versus allow to high bid.

I think the best way to balance it is stop trying to balance it at all. Don't make one or the other better. Make crafters able to do all but the most incredible and rare shit. BUT, give the crafters the ability to customize the look of the items, either items they created or items that were looted off of mobs. You could have the same exact Sword of UberDouche +37 dropped of a dragon that your enemy has, but yours looks completely different, with some bad ass trim on it. Make the customizations colorful and numerous, like the costumes in CoH. And for the real catasses that just have to have some rare, super-rare PVE loot, have there be only a few that are completely unique. Add one unique per class a month. And I do mean ONLY ONE PER SERVER, that once you get it, no one else can have it.

Of course, I'd also like to see PVP in the game, such that even if you weren't flagged PVP, when you get that one unique item per month, you become flagged for PVP by all at all times. If you lose, you can get looted of that 1 super-unique item.

That's what I call the Principle of Uber Item Douche Rarity.

I'm not, I'm watching the screen, which means I'm not watching the chat box.

Let's take a look at Dynasty Warriors. Just for shits and giggles and for an alternative. By the way, they are making a Way of the Samurai Online in Japan - so this sort of thing has been thought up. But anyway, in Dynasty Warriors 5, if you kill a guy with a big enough combo or quickly enough or without getting hit, the loot can change. And it can change radically. You can get a permanent attack+8 instead of +2. Also, with enough of a luck stat (which means letting your other stats hurt a bit), there's simply better loot to get. Also, why aren't there any puzzles in online games?

Would it be so bad to have a dungeon system like Zelda or Diablo or God of War (the Hades or Rome Stages)? Or full areas that seem like single player games? You know what happens at the end? You get a key. THEN, since the game is based on skill, you have the ability to go to the next area. Or whatever. I realize that MMOGs can't have the production value in every dungeon like those games, but hell, they have level designers and quest designers. Might not be as fun, but it'll be like a special part of the world.

I'm just saying, there are alternatives - and ding grats at some random arbitrary set of experience is an idea older than my grandpa. And a reminder that what you just did was waste enough time to see that little leveling animation.

Levels are a marketing ploy and are unlikely to leave.  They are artificial goals that can be maintained with only minimal content.  Until the current marketing strategies change, subscriptions are the cash cows rather than box sales.  Keeping people chasing after a carrot is the key to subscription success.

What keeps people in games for the long haul? 

1. Social networks

2. An artificial ceiling that is always changing (i.e. raising the bar continually over time).

3. Keeping both of these interconnected and enjoyable.

If designers can do a better job of masking the level grind, they'll be successful.  I think WoW does this pretty well, at least at the early stages, by having a large number of quests coupled to the rate of granting new abilities.   It just gets obnoxious when you have to kill 100 rats, then 1000 greater rats, then 10,000 demonic rats. 

I think people embrace levels.  It gives them a marker by which they can compare themselves to other gamers.  It also gives them a sense of advancement within the game world.  Of course, we all know that there are many different gaming personalities within each community and some are more "achiever" than others.  Since I'm more of a social gamer, I'm sure I could enjoy gaming without them. I'm just not sure anyone is willing to generate enough unique content in a game to maintain player retention over the long haul.  Without levels, the amount of content would have to rise almost exponentially to keep players interested beyond the first month or two.

Unless you are charging them by the scenario/content consumption, as opposed to a flat monthly fee.

This is some cat in the hat shit, keep it going...

On the pvp front, I would seriously like to know how much influence can be garnered in pvp before the "achievers" (read: carebears  :-D ) start being upset?

It seems to me, judging from the wailing about stats when the pvp items first came out in WoW (they were considered better then MC gear by many on the cesspool boards) PvE'ers want their achievements to be the most important or they are not happy.  If that is the case, there is no way to make the two sides happy, because meaningful pvp that influences the world is in a constant state of flux (one side wins and razes town X, then the defenders return and rebuild it and start again).  Whereas in pve you either win or dont and I dont see any way to set it up where people can have meaningful world-changing pve encounters because then you are in a sleeper's tomb (I think that was the encounter that only could be beat once per server?) situation.  Eventually someone will win and its not like the dragon can keep comming back like a bad horror movie character to be beat and have the world influenced again can there?

Depends on how hardcore anti they are.  The worst of them? None. None at all.  If you can influence their gameplay at all, the game is horrible and the devs are clearly PKs themselves for supporting such griefing idiots.

 :heart:

I'd play that game in a heartbeat.

I would help kill the douche just to see him lose the item.

Then I would laugh.

Make it so the item never decays when dropped in the world.

I'd steal it from a corpse, carry it out to a remote spot in the wilderness, and drop it there.  Someone is eventually going to feel very, very lucky.

If you kill the douche and take the item doesn't that make you the new douche?

The more I think about this, the more it sounds like the SWG Jedi system done right.  Or something.  Attainable through a known path, doesn't necessarily involve catassing, and with built-in limits so you don't have an infinite number of uber douches running around.

I'm assuming I wouldn't get loot credit.

Rare loot would never work because everyone that plops down their $15 a month wants to be a special snowflake.  This is quite possibly at the root of most mmogs: that everyone wants to be the hero.  With time, everyone can be.  What you're left with is then a world of heros where noone is special.  It's an interesting thing.

Make being a hero based on skill and 85% of the people will quit early when they realize they aren't among the best.  Make it based upon time and the casual players will leave once they come to grips with the fact that they will never be able to enjoy being at the top, ever.  Allowing everyone to be a hero after they jump through some set series of hoops seems to be a great answer for the marketing department. 

Whatever happened to everyone playing a game for different reasons? Aren't mmos rather limited in this area?

Or games with 3D graphics and 3D gameplay? (eg. doing something 2D cannot)

Fuck them and all MMOG players in their stupid little clown shoe asses. That's part of the biggest problem with MMOG's. Everyone must be equal no matter how unequal to the task of being equal every equivalent little twat is.

Special snowflakes should be melted in the white-hot heat of my disdain for their uniqueness.

Agreed, I had the most fun in SWG when I was some mediocre guy out in the wilderness beating shit up and ocassionally getting my ass handed to me, then came the CU and everyone was suddenly, magically fucking equal. Equally fucking useless. But apparently, since I liked things the old way, I "wasn't a team player" and "liked being uber", fuck that shit, I was by no means uber, I just liked not having to hang out with fucking hero-wannabe shitheels when I wanted to shoot some random space creature in the ass. Now everybody's a goddamn cookie cutter copy of everyone else and they all suck equally, whoopie fuckin' do.

I agree.  This is my problem with mainstream mmog's (*cough* WoW *cough*).  In their urgency to appeal to the masses they generate a world of benign mediocrity. 

I want more niche games damnit!

Fucking general public...

I hear this said a lot and I have to say I no longer agree with it.  The majority of MMOG subscribers today don't strike me as having the same expectations a lot of us early-timers had who came out of the early single-player RPG market or had D&D backgrounds.  From what I see most are content to use the game as a 3D chat room and/or large guild activities, neither of which elevates the player to the Big Hero Of The Land.

People today want to be entertained - they want that entertainment to be direct and not impersonal.  But that's not the same thing as a subscriberbase that demands devs pick the lint out of their navel either.

I'm with you, Poco.   The complaints of "it's too easy" also seem too closely linked to "It doesn't make me catass enough" far too often for my comfort.  Wow is a fun game, with the emphasis on having fun.  That breaks-down at the high-end with the raiding bullshit, but saying 'it's too easy' because it doesn't punish you for wanting to just have fun is crap.  Not having to deal with the bullshit and time-sinks of older games just makes me all the happier when someone says they quit due to its ease.

But WoW DOES go the route of making the individual player the route of the hero. All the quests are focused on you (even the group ones), and it's very much about making what you do feel important to you no matter who else is involved. Now, I think that's one of its strengths, but at the same time, it does keep the idea of making rare, one-of-a-kind loot available. Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if it were found that only 1 of an uber-item could be possessed on a server. Imagine the even bigger wailing and gnashing of teeth from the uber catass cockmunchers that would result if said item was lootable on PVP loss. Remember the Jedi perma-death thing?

Any idiot that says "it's too easy" should just hook up their genitals to a car battery and shock away every time they screw up or die. Death penalties are for people with small dicks trying to overcompensate. The challenge is in the process, not in the penalty when I fail. Failure is failure.

Amen.

I felt more like one of those little peons running from trees back to bases going "oooooook." Like some sort of undead Lil Jon. Don't blame me for getting bored with my 50th fetch quest.

Shit, I knew I should've trademarked that idea.

Some people don't like chess. It's too deep and involved for them. They hate the fact that they could spend a lifetime and never master the game.  They would rather play a game that they can hop right into and win immediately.  This is what entertains them.  In the past, they could have opted for checkers.  Checkers is a shallow learning curve game that can provide fun for the novice and expert alike.   There is nothing wrong with liking either game.  We all have different ways we like to be entertained.  It's all about diversity.   

Poker is another game that I think has people fooled into believing it's like checkers when in reality, it's more like chess.  People can play and become successful immediately, but success in the long run requires a much deeper dedication to the subtleties inherent to the game.  Someone that has studied poker and dedicated time to learn the game will find deeper satisfaction in very small improvements or refinements over time.  These masters of poker will win much more consistently.  Then there's the slot machine.  You pull the arm and get a result.  No skill.  No learning curve.  Still there are people entertained for hours playing slot machines.  

I don't like WoW because it was "too easy".  Bring on the car battery. 

WoW is a superficial action movie.  It's entertaining, but not in any sort of deep way.   While I appreciate these qualities about WoW, it didn't contain enough to warrant my long-term interest.  Considering the vast resources poured into the game, this fact disappointed me.  Games don't need to take longer to accomplish goals, they need to be deeper.  There are people that can master chess an poker quickly.  There are those that will take longer, but will master the games eventually.  There are also those that will never master the games and stick with checkers or the slot machines.  If I'm going to spend money on entertainment, I'll opt for chess or poker.  I'm the same with movies or books. It's a personal preference.


 

MMOG's are nothing like chess. Losing at a game of chess usually does not involve a kick in the chao sack, followed by the winner casting aspersions on both the loser's sexuality AND his mother's chastity, nor the mangling of the English language with symbols and numbers.

MMOG's are much more like poker, in that the loser is usually left bankrupt, naked and weeping with a bottle of Mad Dog.

WoW is no deeper nor any more shallow than any other level-based MMO.  Most arguments looking for more 'depth' or 'challenge' from the game amount to, "I'm able to accomplish my goals too quickly, slow it down, I'm paying $15 a month I want this to take a long time."

There is a skill and a learning curve to WoW the same as to EQ, AC, AO, etc.  I say this because there are some clever people in the playerbase who have managed to take 'gimpy' classes and do some fantastic things with them.  In the same vein there are people who can regularly defeat 'overpowered' classes because they don't listen to the 'OMG unbeatable!' rhetoric.

However, all the 'hardcore' players have ignored this because they didn't get to be super-leet and parade around at the top end all by their lonesome.

I dont see why "too easy" equals death penalty, but yes WoW's death penalty is a major part of my problem with it.  I dont need people to loose exp or get a hummer from an Interstate battery.  But I do need them to stay dead for enough time for me to regain my health and mana not bind rush me 30 seconds later thanks to WoW's 0 death penalty, not even a loss of time.

I would say I fall into the "too easy" camp but typically I'm referring to the lack of player skill needed to accomplish anything in the game, not my disapointment over a lack of opportunities to catass.

agreed, but then you have to fight everyone else's desire for "customization" and "uniqueness".  It ain't just green hair and funny tatoos that players want to distinguish themselves, it's that magic pointed stick.   And if you agree to scale that kind of stuff back, then the whole vision of "letting players tell their own stories" has to be reworked, or rejustified, and respun to players to make the buy$.  What I'm trying to say is that catass loot is sort of a part of the sandbox, so designers would need to apply extra customization in other ways that wouldn't unbalance the economy or combat to make up for it.

Ah but that is why I like death in WoW - you could always hearth away, pop an invis potion, etc... ;)

I agree.  My problem with WoW was that they had this ocean of resources available to them and still produced what amounts to the same level of superficial entertainment we've already seen.  What happens? The masses eat it up.  They're justified by continuing along a path of mediocrity.

The other reason I posted my particular rant was that I didn't want to leave anyone thinking that I wanted the rate of success slowed down in these games.  Games shouldn't be a grind but like a good puzzle.  A skilled person should appreciate the depth and fluorish in a reasonable amount of time.  Whacking 100, then 1000, then 10,000 foozles isn't a good way to separate players.  I think most of us believe that the time > skill paradign needs to be broken for MMOG's to advance to the next level. 

Ideally I'd like to see the best players be those able to understand the depth of the game rather than those that can devote the most time to it. Though it's often tough to make those two traits independant. I'd also like to see mental reflexes triumph over twitch... but that's more of a personal bias. 

That's not a problem of the death penalty, that's a problem with PVP being tacked onto a PVE game. Frankly, I don't have any clue why a PVP death in a WoW contested zone doesn't take you to a graveyard that is exclusively your faction's, far enough away from the other faction's graveyards that it's a walk back. I mean shit, you die in Ashenvale trying to take over Astranaar, you respawn at the graveyard outside Ashenvale. HUH?

But again, that has nothing to do with how harsh the death penalty is or not, that's just retarded, shortsighted design, grafting PVP into PVE zones.

Something not mentioned in this thread (mentioned elsewhere on other occassions) is that WoW has PvP done right.  This is another thing I HATED about SWG board warrioring, the PvEers would go absolutely berserk if you would suggest anything like WoW's PvP system- if there was ONE item in the game that only PvPers could get all hell would break loose and you are a griefer and a pk for suggesting it.

I love the ranking system (especially with the "maintain rank for the purpose of buying items" patch).  I love battlegrounds.  Most of all, I love 1v1 pvp.  People tell me that I'm supposed to get pwnt hard 1v1 with my mage, but I enjoy honing my skills against every class of 60 in random encounters.  Engineering adds such a fun wrinkle to it.  I found out today that although my world enlarger stops working when I attack someone, I can attack someone and THEN put it on.  I would poly someone (which detargets you) and then activate it.  I found that I got an extra split second before I was charged after the poly broke when doing this, as during the wildly revolving camera during sheep phase I think I was harder to target and some could not target me until the first spell hit and/or they didn't see where I went after the poly.  It got me a second at most, but that can be crucial.  People don't give pvp enough credit in WoW.  Its more balanced than any pvp I've ever played before (a few exceptions, like Wrath Hunters and the entire shaman class) and fun. 

I think your views on WoW pvp are even more batshit insane then your views on politics.  WoW's pvp "system" works on pve servers for pve players.  Its complete bullshit for anyone who cares more about player vrs player interaction then catass uber raiding and dkp point systems...

Oh and no I will not show you on the doll where WoW pvp touched me, fucking carebears.

paladin?

Lacking direct experience with the WoW endgame, I thought it best to remove my response.

Carry on... nothing to see here.

WoW PvP is alright.  This comes from a pure PvE player who never really PvP'd in an MMO before due to imbalance / inaccessibility. 

WoW pvp sucks. I had access to level 60s of every class too. My original char was a shaman, so you know how that goes.

WoW's PVP would be kind of fun on one of the new PvP-RP servers provided there was a way to communicate with the other faction. For now it's just someone emoting and spewing out "ARAH ER UGH PAK CHOOIE UNF" before ganking you and spitting on your corpse 100 times.

I don't like black licorice.  Because it is Not Cheesecake.  People who eat black licorice must be dumb to eat something that is Not Cheesecake.

 :roll:

I can't fault the logic. Cheesecake is dreamy, while black licorice is mined straight from Satan's anus.

(http://photos1.blogger.com/img/145/1296/640/cheney%20boots.jpg)

I haven't played much, but afaik, WoW PvP is fucked (on the PvP servers at least). Mixmatched zones just puts me in a position to get ganked by higher levels. Not really my definition of "fun" or "competitive". Ganking and getting gang raped is NOT "PvP".

When it does work though (that is, when opposing Alliance or Horde in any given zone are roughly equal level), I think it's great. As far as the combat itself goes, I'm having a good time so far.

That's not Satan's anus. Even Satan's afraid of that particular browneye...

Ideally I'd like to see the best players be those able to understand the depth of the game rather than those that can devote the most time to it. Though it's often tough to make those two traits independant. I'd also like to see mental reflexes triumph over twitch... but that's more of a personal bias. - Nebu

Just a thought, I feel that Mental Reflexes are absolutely REQUIRED to triumph in twitch gaming. The good fighting games allow YOU to inject your personality into your playstyle/fighting style. You can tell at a glance HOW experienced your opponent is based on how he fights. Sadly, I don't believe that our bandwith connections will ever be fast enough that an MMO could have someting EVEN remotely as deep as games like Sould Calibur etc.

The Wow Fighting game mechanic is pretty fun. In fact its really the only reason I still play. I never farmed or grinded to get to the next lvl. I just enjoyed how the fighting system in this MMO was much faster paced that previous ones. The introduction of Battlegrounds made the only thing I liked, into a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE grind (pvp). Since I never had time to raid MC/onyxia, I never got decent gear. and its hard to compete w/ all purple'd out opponents, since this game is only very slightly skill based. BUT the fact that I was in mostly green gear AND could still woop on many 60's when i was still in mid 50's was fun enough.

Too bad there not much real pvp going on...

(http://usuarios.lycos.es/clubdeluniverso/asylum/selafilia/reanimator.jpg)

Nice.