Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[HaemishM]

You guys completely missed my point. Nobody cares about the people actually beating hard modes. They're a vanishingly small proportion of the population.

Why would you continue to piss money away on content that such a tiny, idiotic, elitist, shit-grubbing, douche-whiney, sandy vagina cadre of crotchpheasants will EVER get to see? You'd have more honey to attract and keep those flies if you just put blank marble slabs in the game's home city and told players "This will be your statue one day when you conquer the Great Whargablargle."

Content is hard to create, expensive, and you can never ever ever make enough of it to satisfy even the people who will never see all of it. Stop wasting money making content for shitgoblins.

[Threash]

Obviously there has to be a top tier, but that top tier should be doable by a retarded chipmunk in a wheelchair.

It already is. If you put in the time, religiously show up on time, and don't generate drama, you will be one of the top PvE players in the world. Diku-style progression is all about time and attention. Player skill has minimal impact. These games are all incredibly easy, you just need to play a lot and focus on what you're doing when required.

The problem with raiding isn't the minimum amount of effort required to beat them, is that it is not just my effort that matters but that of X other people.  The bigger the X is the more frustrating and unfun the content gets, once it goes past "group content" and into "raid content" you already passed the maximum number you can have and still be fun.  That's why raid content is never acceptable.

[sam, an eggplant]

Why would you continue to piss money away on content that such a tiny,

I kinda feel like I answered that question in my recent posts here.

The time creating that content was wasted in Wildstar, because it only had one difficulty level, set to 11. It isn't wasted in WoW, because anyone can trivially consume it at the difficulty level they find enjoyable.

[Nebu]

Why would you continue to piss money away on content that such a tiny, idiotic, elitist, shit-grubbing, douche-whiney, sandy vagina cadre of crotchpheasants will EVER get to see? You'd have more honey to attract and keep those flies if you just put blank marble slabs in the game's home city and told players "This will be your statue one day when you conquer the Great Whargablargle."

Content is hard to create, expensive, and you can never ever ever make enough of it to satisfy even the people who will never see all of it. Stop wasting money making content for shitgoblins.

 

You had me at 'crotchpheasant'.

It's pretty simple for me:  Raiding design sucks when it becomes more about cat herding/explaining/proper build/proper group makeup than it does about getting several people together to have fun.

[Nevermore]

What's important is that apex achievement needs to exist for lesser players' aspirations.

No, it doesn't.  Even for a tiny number of people.  Most people don't actually give a shit.

The only achievements you need are stupid little one-liners for killing 10/100/1000 dudes.

I believe you're completely wrong. The apex achievement doesn't necessarily have to be a nut crunching raid boss or zone or even group based, but there really needs to be a top tier level of challenging content.

Why?

[sam, an eggplant]

Why?

Because these games are monetized by subscriptions and you want people to keep paying. If they consume all your content in the first week, they won't stay for week two.

(Note: not trying to derail into a sub vs F2P discussion. But it is pertinent, and answers your question.)

[Nebu]

I believe that the top tier of skill-based content would be players fighting against players, not players beating an AI mechanic.  That's very easy to design and requires much fewer resources.  It amazes me how poorly most MMO's implement it.

[sam, an eggplant]

It already is. Like I said, PvE doesn't require much skill at all, even in challenging hardmodes. You just need to put in the time and pay attention.

But PvP is a totally different game. Some enjoy it, some don't.

[Nebu]

It already is.

The players haven't figured this out yet.  They equate raid shiny with skill.  While partially true (raiding does require a certain skill), it doesn't compare with a well crafted pvp experience in depth and complexity.

[Malakili]

It already is.

The players haven't figured this out yet.  They equate raid shiny with skill.  While partially true (raiding does require a certain skill), it doesn't compare with a well crafted pvp experience in depth and complexity.

People would rather have easy to acquire shiny gear to show off than "depth and complexity."   Hell, just look at how much money people shell out for skins and cosmetic items in games.  I've done it on occasion myself, admittedly.  It's about social distinction more than gameplay in a lot of these kinds of games.

[Typhon]

It already is.

The players haven't figured this out yet.  They equate raid shiny with skill.  While partially true (raiding does require a certain skill), it doesn't compare with a well crafted pvp experience in depth and complexity.

People would rather have easy to acquire shiny gear to show off than "depth and complexity."   Hell, just look at how much money people shell out for skins and cosmetic items in games.  I've done it on occasion myself, admittedly.  It's about social distinction more than gameplay in a lot of these kinds of games.

Is this really why folks buy hats/skins/costumes?  I bought them in LoL cause I liked the skin.  I never, ever gave a fuck what someone else thought.  Same for costumes in Marvel.  Maybe I'm the non-normal one?

[Nebu]

Is this really why folks buy hats/skins/costumes?  I bought them in LoL cause I liked the skin.  I never, ever gave a fuck what someone else thought.  Same for costumes in Marvel.  Maybe I'm the non-normal one?

Yes, it really is for the majority of MMO gamers.  Why else do you think someone would slog hours and hours through a raid other than to laud it over those that don't have the time or connections to do it themselves?  Raids really aren't a fun enough mechanic to play them for any other reasons beyond the show-off shiny and the sheer ability to proclaim that you conquered the content. 

I'm really starting to see that MMO's are for people that either like to socialize and/or have more time than sense. 

[Nevermore]

Why?

Because these games are monetized by subscriptions and you want people to keep paying. If they consume all your content in the first week, they won't stay for week two.

(Note: not trying to derail into a sub vs F2P discussion. But it is pertinent, and answers your question.)

That didn't answer my question, which was referring to the need for multiple tiers.  I'll requote it for you since you took it out.

What's important is that apex achievement needs to exist for lesser players' aspirations.

No, it doesn't.  Even for a tiny number of people.  Most people don't actually give a shit.

The only achievements you need are stupid little one-liners for killing 10/100/1000 dudes.

I believe you're completely wrong. The apex achievement doesn't necessarily have to be a nut crunching raid boss or zone or even group based, but there really needs to be a top tier level of challenging content.

[sam, an eggplant]

It did answer your question.

Players need what I'm called an "apex achievement" to aspire towards. For PvE, that's hardmode raiding. The most challenging content, the best rewards. Without an apex achievement, lower-difficulty content feels less meaningful as it isn't a clear path to greatness. You have no reason to continue progressing, which short-circuits the rewards-- you don't care about getting them, just like at the end of an expansion, because you realize they're meaningless and will soon be superceded by a gear reset. And then you stop playing and (3-9 months later) realize you're still paying and cancel your subscription.

Wildstar had the apex achievement, but tuned it so challenging that most players couldn't progress at all. Even their dungeons were tuned waaaaay too hard. There was no clearly marked path to progress from leveling to max-level casual to hardcore. And without that progression, you lose your "feeder pool" of formerly-casual raiders to recruit for apex hardmode raiding. And that's why Wildstar is in the toilet. They could only recruit people that already self-identified as or aspired to be hardcore raiders. They didn't convert casuals to raiders.

WoW has the apex achievement in their hardmode raids, but also offers easy and normal modes, so players can reach their most comfortable level. It offers a clear progress path from leveling to dungeons to hard dungeons (which are not actually hard) to easy raids, normal raids, and then finally hardmode raids. Most players stop climbing that ladder before reaching hardmode raids. But knowing that the apex is still there is one of many factors that keeps them playing. Not the only factor. But an important one.

If these games didn't charge a subscription fee, they could offer up new content and expect players to consume it quickly, then stop playing until they release more. That's what Guild Wars 2 does. It's certainly more player-friendly! But if you charge a sub, you can't get away with that.

[HaemishM]

The apex achievement does NOT have to be raiding - that mentality is what has fucked most of the failing MMOG's out there. Raiding implies that you have to have content that requires 20+ people to experience. That drives people who might normally enjoy it batty because fuck sharing spoils with 20 other assholes who may or may not be complete tools. I liken it to this - when I played EQ1, the apex achievement was killing a dragon. Just getting to that shit took an insane amount of time, as well as an insane amount of logistical and political bullshit as I got my guild into an alliance that could do the raid. And then after the first one, I got exactly NO LOOT and ate a death doing it. In the end I led like 15 Vox raids (and almost as many Nagafen, Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate raids) and in all that time I got maybe 3-4 pieces of gear. The rewards weren't there.

I wasn't raiding to experience the joy of leading 39 strangers to victory using the worst community tools ever (read: none). I was ultimately doing it to get good loot. The loot was the apex achievement and frankly, raiding was a shit way for me to achieve that. It wasn't the raiding that kept me going, it was the promise of gear and the fact that EQ1 was the only game in town.

There is no "only game in town" for raiding anymore. And people don't have time to deal with raid bullshit just for shiny especially when they can get that shiney other places. Hardcore raiding as a core design feature of a game is a quick path to cancelled subscriptions.

[Nevermore]

It did answer your question.

Players need what I'm called an "apex achievement" to aspire towards. For PvE, that's hardmode raiding. The most challenging content, the best rewards. Without an apex achievement, lower-difficulty content feels less meaningful as it isn't a clear path to greatness. You have no reason to continue progressing, which short-circuits the rewards-- you don't care about getting them, just like at the end of an expansion, because you realize they're meaningless and will soon be superceded by a gear reset. And then you stop playing and (3-9 months later) realize you're still paying and cancel your subscription.

That time you answered it.  I disagree with your assertion that some kind of apex is needed to make all content feel meaningful.  Content is meaningful when people have fun doing it.  Any kind of content should be fun on its own merits.

[Draegan]

You guys completely missed my point. Nobody cares about the people actually beating hard modes. They're a vanishingly small proportion of the population.

Why would you continue to piss money away on content that such a tiny, idiotic, elitist, shit-grubbing, douche-whiney, sandy vagina cadre of crotchpheasants will EVER get to see? You'd have more honey to attract and keep those flies if you just put blank marble slabs in the game's home city and told players "This will be your statue one day when you conquer the Great Whargablargle."

Content is hard to create, expensive, and you can never ever ever make enough of it to satisfy even the people who will never see all of it. Stop wasting money making content for shitgoblins.

Should Riot not have took the time to develop Master and Challenger tiers and how that system works for the top 1% of players in the world? Do hundreds of thousands of people not watch pro-LOL/DOTA streamers playing the game? It's the shame shit is spirit.

A bad game developer creates assets and spends the majority of time creating content for the top 1% that only they can see. A good game developer creates content for the top 1% but also uses it for everyone else in varying degrees.

[Draegan]

Obviously there has to be a top tier, but that top tier should be doable by a retarded chipmunk in a wheelchair.

It already is. If you put in the time, religiously show up on time, and don't generate drama, you will be one of the top PvE players in the world. Diku-style progression is all about time and attention. Player skill has minimal impact. These games are all incredibly easy, you just need to play a lot and focus on what you're doing when required.

The problem with raiding isn't the minimum amount of effort required to beat them, is that it is not just my effort that matters but that of X other people.  The bigger the X is the more frustrating and unfun the content gets, once it goes past "group content" and into "raid content" you already passed the maximum number you can have and still be fun.  That's why raid content is never acceptable.

The big words you put in there is "TO YOU". A lot of people enjoy raiding games and large group encounters. Just look at all the PVP guilds that gather together every time and enjoy GW2, ESO, AA. The games are shitty, but there are thousands upon thousands of people ready to do large group encounter stuff. Most people suck at making massive online games that are good.

Raid content is fine, and it has it's audience. There just hasn't been a good game in a while that supports it unless you want to count WOW even though its a decade old.

[Draegan]

Why would you continue to piss money away on content that such a tiny, idiotic, elitist, shit-grubbing, douche-whiney, sandy vagina cadre of crotchpheasants will EVER get to see? You'd have more honey to attract and keep those flies if you just put blank marble slabs in the game's home city and told players "This will be your statue one day when you conquer the Great Whargablargle."

Content is hard to create, expensive, and you can never ever ever make enough of it to satisfy even the people who will never see all of it. Stop wasting money making content for shitgoblins.

 

You had me at 'crotchpheasant'.

It's pretty simple for me:  Raiding design sucks when it becomes more about cat herding/explaining/proper build/proper group makeup than it does about getting several people together to have fun.

Yes. The moment one of your designers creates an encounter that requires XYZ to work, or it's impossible is a shitty designer. Cat herding is one thing, it sucks. That's why I really like the Flex thing. Explaining will always happen. The problem is when one person fucks up, you wipe, and you start all over. Fuck that.

And just so you know, I hate raiding and hope to never do it again and I haven't for at least 3 years. The original point was that raiding has it's place, just like pet battle games have it's place. You can't toss the whole genre just because game devs suck at their job and keep making shit games. Not only that, but MMO devs seem to forget that there are probably other activities to put in your game that don't require raiding and could equally be fun. Most senior MMO devs forget what fun looks like.

[Draegan]

What's important is that apex achievement needs to exist for lesser players' aspirations.

No, it doesn't.  Even for a tiny number of people.  Most people don't actually give a shit.

The only achievements you need are stupid little one-liners for killing 10/100/1000 dudes.

I believe you're completely wrong. The apex achievement doesn't necessarily have to be a nut crunching raid boss or zone or even group based, but there really needs to be a top tier level of challenging content.

Why?

Because online games typically don't have an end and devs want you to keep playing.
- MMOs always have another dragon to slay and more +1 gear to get.
- MOBAs always have another rank to achieve and ladder to climb.
- Diablo games always have better gear, more ladders, more points to get.

It's a fairly simple concept.

It did answer your question.

Players need what I'm called an "apex achievement" to aspire towards. For PvE, that's hardmode raiding. The most challenging content, the best rewards. Without an apex achievement, lower-difficulty content feels less meaningful as it isn't a clear path to greatness. You have no reason to continue progressing, which short-circuits the rewards-- you don't care about getting them, just like at the end of an expansion, because you realize they're meaningless and will soon be superceded by a gear reset. And then you stop playing and (3-9 months later) realize you're still paying and cancel your subscription.

That time you answered it.  I disagree with your assertion that some kind of apex is needed to make all content feel meaningful.  Content is meaningful when people have fun doing it.  Any kind of content should be fun on its own merits.

Follow up:
People like getting rewards. It makes them feel good about themselves. If they run out of a reward path, they quit the game most of the time. I agree with Haemish it doesn't have to be raiding, because fuck that, but it has to be something to keep people playing. Combine that with a fun game and you will have a major success (like League of Legends: Apex Achievement like your ranking and an extremely fun game to play).

[Lantyssa]

Why spend time making content that keeps 1% working towards something rather than 99%.  Or even 25%?  Or 10%?  That effort could go into something for more people if you're going to use that argument that it's about the money.

[Kageru]

An MMO needs a goal for each player to work towards. It can be anything. Hats in TF2, achievements, hard mode completion, a backpack that eats bloodstone dust, cap your crafting, elite weapons with slightly better effects but unique looks, vehicles in fallen earth, Titans in Eve, competitive ranking, causing grief in day-z. As long as it's something for the player to go "yeah, the game is mostly fun to play and I have a goal I'm working towards". It fails if the play isn't enough fun to justify working towards the goal or the goal is so remote and unlikely that you know it's not achievable.

Heck, Minecraft proved this with "I will put in many hours to build the thing, so that people can see I built the thing".

You can have as many goals as you want types of players and even players will want different goals at different times. Sometimes I just want to farm mobs or go wandering because I'm playing to relax, sometimes I want fairly easy content to duo with the wife, sometimes I may want challenging group content because my gamer friends are online. The idea that it is always, and can only be, hard-core raiding is at best an immense over-simplification.

I have no idea if Wild-star contained achievable goals for the player population they hoped to retain. For me the moment to moment game-play was simply so tiring, tedious and bland it wasn't fun enough for me to consider setting myself a goal. Including the implicit goal of the MMO, get to maximum level. The idea of building up your virtual house has always likewise mystified me, but if developers have found the effort invested in development keeps enough players occupied to justify it then that's fine with me.

[Draegan]

Why spend time making content that keeps 1% working towards something rather than 99%.  Or even 25%?  Or 10%?  That effort could go into something for more people if you're going to use that argument that it's about the money.

I thought that was obvious? You need to make content for everyone, but you should be spending the most resources making it for the majority of your playerbase. Even Wildstar did that for the most part. The problem is that is was a terribly designed game. You went from all the casual/solo content (leveling, pvp, housing, crafting, dungeons) right to apex content (20-40 man raids). There was no in between. There was no gradient to the apex so as soon as you hit 50 you got smacked with it. Because you get smacked with it you begin to think that the whole game is now for hardcore even though you just spent 50-80 hours leveling through the majority of the development effort.

[Fabricated]

You don't really need hardcore raid content. What you need is LOTS of content in general and keep it coming. People would be fine with a game that was 3-5 man instances with maybe 10-man raids if you could crank out decent content on a quick, consistent basis. Otherwise, yeah, I agree with the notion that there is something to having a carrot-and-stick to keep people interested in progressing. Neither is easy to do right though.

This is me though; my ideal form of WoW at this point would be them retooling every dungeon from all the expansions the way they did in Cata and using their auto-scaling system to do "dungeon playlists" like Destiny's strike playlists, maybe even with their heroic-type modifiers.

[Lantyssa]

re: Draegan.  Fab snuck in there.

They only have so many resources.  If they focused on the in-between stages, which I would argue would serve more than the 1% high-end content that they did focus on, then they wouldn't have been able to do the 1% content.

So your complaint is that they didn't do what I said, which is focus on the larger group to begin with.

[tmp]

Because these games are monetized by subscriptions and you want people to keep paying. If they consume all your content in the first week, they won't stay for week two.

(Note: not trying to derail into a sub vs F2P discussion. But it is pertinent, and answers your question.)

If these people stay, it's not because of the "apex of PvE" they aspire to, because Lantyssa is absolutely correct bulk of these people don't give two shits about it. Either out of ignorance (as in, they don't even know where they can find basic upgrade for their gear or that they even could use one, let alone there's some "apex" beyond their myopic horizon) or literally due to not giving a shit beyond "well, that's nice".

[Nevermore]

Follow up:
People like getting rewards. It makes them feel good about themselves. If they run out of a reward path, they quit the game most of the time. I agree with Haemish it doesn't have to be raiding, because fuck that, but it has to be something to keep people playing. Combine that with a fun game and you will have a major success (like League of Legends: Apex Achievement like your ranking and an extremely fun game to play).

Of course.  My point is why expend resources on the smallest group of people instead of on the player base as a whole?

[Lakov_Sanite]

This whole thread is damn entertaining stuff.

[Nebu]

This whole thread is damn entertaining stuff.

Moreso than the game. 

[Lakov_Sanite]

This thread needs to exist so posters in other threads have something to aspire to.

[Ingmar]

Follow up:
People like getting rewards. It makes them feel good about themselves. If they run out of a reward path, they quit the game most of the time. I agree with Haemish it doesn't have to be raiding, because fuck that, but it has to be something to keep people playing. Combine that with a fun game and you will have a major success (like League of Legends: Apex Achievement like your ranking and an extremely fun game to play).

Of course.  My point is why expend resources on the smallest group of people instead of on the player base as a whole?

Super-hardmode raids don't take a ton of extra effort above and beyond what already goes into making the regular ones, so if your regular raid game is good it's pretty low-hanging fruit to add a 'chase' level of difficulty for the hardcore types. Where Wildstar fell down is forgetting to make accessible normal modes (and forgetting to not have shitty combat); it's not raiding itself that's the problem.

[Nebu]

While we're on the topic, you all should be getting an email soon that gives you a free 7 day pass to play Wildstar again. 

I deleted it immediately.

[Draegan]

re: Draegan.  Fab snuck in there.

They only have so many resources.  If they focused on the in-between stages, which I would argue would serve more than the 1% high-end content that they did focus on, then they wouldn't have been able to do the 1% content.

So your complaint is that they didn't do what I said, which is focus on the larger group to begin with.

There are too many complaints about Wildstar to begin with. If you want to talk about WS only, their problem was that they didn't spend enough time focusing on anything. Their design was shit and not very deep. Given that, they didn't really focus on raiding too much compared to the amount of time they put into housing, pve leveling content, adventures, dungeons etc., which is all casual friendly stuff. The developers only problem was they they talked about "hardcore raiding" way too much when they didn't have a really good raid game in place to begin with.

[Draegan]

Follow up:
People like getting rewards. It makes them feel good about themselves. If they run out of a reward path, they quit the game most of the time. I agree with Haemish it doesn't have to be raiding, because fuck that, but it has to be something to keep people playing. Combine that with a fun game and you will have a major success (like League of Legends: Apex Achievement like your ranking and an extremely fun game to play).

Of course.  My point is why expend resources on the smallest group of people instead of on the player base as a whole?

I don't understand your point. You create a game with hard content and easy content and stuff in between that gets you from easy to hard if you want to do it. You just don't create a game with only easy stuff. You don't create a game with just hard stuff.

Do you really want to create an online game, with a social aspect, that has a business model of keeping people playing and just have all easy content? That doesn't sound smart to me.

[sam, an eggplant]

Yep, many people were responding to a couple straw men, like:

1) Raids are the only possible apex PvE content. Nobody said that.  That said, I haven't seen anything else that works. If anyone has any ideas, please do speak up.
2) Current PvE is the only game that matters. Again, nobody said that. Stuff like pet battles, collecting mounts and costumes, achievements, PvP certainly, RP, soloing old content, all those are all totally valid.

Draegan, I disagree with your assertion that Wildstar dungeons were appropriate for casuals. They totally weren't. Wildstar dungeons are more challenging than normal mode WoW raids. They're completely unforgiving.

I agree that a constant stream of new stuff (areas to explore, quests, storylines, small-group dungeons, etc) could obviate the need for apex PvE content. But again, so far, nobody has been able to do this. Not for lack of trying, Asheron's Call had monthly updates for awhile, Guild Wars 2 is trying twice-monthly updates (after a 3 month gap that recently ended) and so on. Neverwinter comes the closest to real success with their player-create content Foundry. Some very cool adventures in there. Problem is the rewards are ultimately meaningless. Neverwinter doesn't need to retain subscriptions in the first place, as it's F2P. But I would love to see that sort of peanut butter mixed in with my chocolate (WoW) and a bit of nougat (meaningful rewards) in such a way that it isn't immediately exploited to hell and back.