Interesting Age of Conan Player Poll Results

[schild]

And so there is a line in the middle. The ones that want to get rid of the grind and the ones that want to make the grind "fun."

How about both? Can't we have both, please?  Challenging fights that you only have to do 10-12 times at most to "ding" (avoiding the whole why have hps/ levels/ etc discussion because ALL games have it, yes even the "skill-system" ones.)

Oh, I completely hope so.

[Slayerik]

I want a game with all fun. Thats right, all fun!

Jeez, its not too much to ask is it? Make me a game thats all fun and no suck!!! This isn't rocket science people! I mean, why do MMOs even have suck in them? Do they add it? I guess they do. Rep grinds, mob grinds for xp, PVP grinds for rewards....

So whats the answer? Play singleplayer game (EDIT) or online FPS if you want fun. If you want suck with fun mixed in, play MMOs.

Whats the real answer? After 10+ years of MMOs I look back and think...jesus we're going backwards. The best MMOs were games from the infancy of the genre. Subspace. "Meet People From Around The World, Then Kill Them" was their slogan. Can we get back to that kinda attitude? UO was alive, fun, competitve, basically had things for all types of players (from great housing system to great PVP). Fucking Tradewars kicks the shit out of most the stuff out today.

Please just go back and look at what made games fun. Look at shit like star control 2. Combine it with Tradewars and subspace...talk about a fun fuckin MMO. STEAL SHIT THAT IS PROVEN FUN SYSTEMS!

The company that figures it out will be able to shit cash at near Blizzard levels.

[tazelbain]

RPG combat is too deteministic.  If you jack up the difficulty, all you have done is increase the number of times the players die.  Every battle shouldn't be a tooth and nail struggle.

One of the reasons I think people like raids is because of puzzle aspect of it.  The single player and group game lacks that puzzle angle. So if I was going to fix the grind  I am going to look at ways to bring puzzles to all levels of the game.  Also you need a good way to explain the puzzle to the players so that they can take advantage of it.

[tmp]

How about both? Can't we have both, please?  Challenging fights that you only have to do 10-12 times at most to "ding" (avoiding the whole why have hps/ levels/ etc discussion because ALL games have it, yes even the "skill-system" ones.)

I'd probably like it personally, but how making the fight "challenging" prevents the whole experience from becoming just as repetitive as the current "grind" 50 fights in the game? To further complicate the issue, at this number of fights you're looking for encounters lasting 5-15 mins each if the games were to retain their progress speed... this is, ironically enough, almost exact opposite of the "token fun game" that's supposedly FPS where the fights are furious and outcomes decided in matter of few seconds* 90% of time.

*) at which point you either move on to next fight or hit quick load/respawn button and are back in action almost immediately. Again noticeably different from the "you'll take the durability hit, do corpse run and like it, maggot" MMO take on it.

[DarkSign]

RPG combat is too deteministic.  If you jack up the difficulty, all you have done is increase the number of times the players die.  Every battle shouldn't be a tooth and nail struggle.

One of the reasons I think people like raids is because of puzzle aspect of it.  The single player and group game lacks that puzzle angle. So if I was going to fix the grind  I am going to look at ways to bring puzzles to all levels of the game.  Also you need a good way to explain the puzzle to the players so that they can take advantage of it.

I've said this many times. My wife play the HELL out of some adventure games. If you brought the interactivity of an Adventure Company (tm) game, with dials, dialog trees, puzzles and such...that would be a great way to make quests better. Of course time (and therefore) money goes into the development of these deeper quests...but there you go...a new direction for MMOs.

If you jack up the difficulty, all you have done is increase the number of times the players die.

I call bullshit on that. Your comment seems to assume two things a) that difficulty cant = fun  b) some arbitrary definition of difficulty that sounds more like it means "too hard for players to figure out and is really just an auto-machine gun turret that insta-kills players" At least that's how it sounds to me.  If you've ever played a PvP game with a guild and felt the difference between an opposing guild that you pwnd vs. an opposing guild that really gave you a run for your money...you'd know that there's a lot of satisfaction in a well-fought battle. Just the same with PvE - if you hit ~ and type /godmode=on, there's a difference in that and beating say, Crysis, with no walkthrough, cheats, and get satisfaction out of scraping yourself to a win. Perhaps that's the problem. Not enough people remember or appreciate the satisfaction of throwing yourself into a game and winning.

The response to that argument of course is.."I play games for fun, not to have another job." Or in other words, hard can be too hard to be fun. I get that. So the solution lays somewhere in the middle for those of us who dont just want to hit one button 4 teh win.

[Rendakor]

DS, the problem is that half the time, you throw yourself against a good guild who gives you a run for your money and DON'T come out on top. Which means that while you have more fun when you win, you die more often.

An easy fix to current MMOs to make players tackle more challenging content would be to increase the Xp from doing higher con content, so that the "fastest" path to max level isn't the path of least resistance, at least not for a skilled player.

[DarkSign]

I see what you're saying...the harder the mob is for you the more xp you get...instead of a set amt of xp regardless of con.  I'd like that...and I think the min-maxers would too. But let's not lose focus on why I even brought up difficulty in the first place - I was arguing that GM controlled mobs would be better than the ai mobs that don't fight as intelligently. Perhaps you'd get more experience for fighting such mobs...although in the way I envision it you wouldnt be sure that's who you were fighting...and figure it out from the xp perhaps.

[Rendakor]

The problem with GM controlled mobs is a question of scale. How many GMs can control how many mobs for how many players? Don't get me wrong, it would be great in a niche game, but something going for mass appeal it's just not doable. If you want to derail further into GM event viability, we can.

[Venkman]

Most of you are still stuck in polishing what is, when the problem (if you see it as a problem) is much deeper.

First, RPGs. Yes, deterministic. But more than that, it's all about you. There's stuff an single or squad-based RPG can do to the world for you that no persistent environment ever could, because all those changes would either be entirely instantiated (the defunct Mythica) or the realm of the 24/7/365 players who got their first. And because the entire world and narrative is about making you a hero, they can afford to compromise on some things, like, ya know, fun combat.

Second, the system of progressive XP. Your abilities are locked behind time behind levels behind XP in games where the only thing you can change is your character. The entire world is designed as gates to your character's customization. It's like slot machines in a casino. You hope to try and find the good pay-out ones, but the act of getting the money is the same exact action over and over. And because the "fun" from winning is so deep-rooted, you dare not muck with the mechanism of delivery too much. Slot machines and mobs, it's the same stuff.

The only way to really change this is to toss out the D&D roots altogether. You can have progression, because that adds long term goals, bragging rights, content blocks, all the stuff that retains. You just can't have it on back of XP gates like PvE, because eventually you'll devolve to the same casino again, and call it a competitive advantage (and be right, for the current crowd).

[Wershlak]

The only way to really change this is to toss out the D&D roots altogether. You can have progression, because that adds long term goals, bragging rights, content blocks, all the stuff that retains. You just can't have it on back of XP gates like PvE, because eventually you'll devolve to the same casino again, and call it a competitive advantage (and be right, for the current crowd).

Right. If you are developing a game you should start at square one and state what you want to create. "A persistant online role playing game centered around player versus player combat" in Conan's case. Once you abbreviate that as MMORPG everyone thinks "Oh, it's like WoW but..."

It's alot easier to think in those terms I guess but there is nothing that says you need levels, classes, stats or XP to have an RPG and in a PvP focused game I think you'd be much better off eliminating levels all together. Hearing Conan has 80 levels, and what sounds like a pretty standard advancement system along with end-game raiding put me in the I'll wait till a month or two after release to hear if it's fun or not category.

[tazelbain]

DS, your critisism places my quote in a far boader context than the sentance "RPG combat is too deteministic."  Most of the time RPG combat could be closely approximated with the role of a 20-sided die.  4 or more you win, 3 or less you lose.  My point is that current state of RPG combat is that "making it more difficult" basicly amounts to shifting the die rolled to needing 12+ to win instead of a 4+.  This is neither more fun, nor more difficult from the players presective, just more random and fustrating.

[DarkSign]

No, actually it doesn't. It's more than a higher DC rating...it's like getting a better DM. The NPC reacts differently entirely...and therefore can be more satisfying. I've played PnP games with good, great, and terrible DMs. And the story can come alive or it can fall on its face if every mob in every campaign plays the same way, or every story unfolds with the same plot devices. 

Put another way, we're not talking about changing the rate of fire for mob guns from 30ms to 12ms. I'm talking about changing entire combat methods so it's more challenging and therefore more fun. It's about changing entire skillsets.

[KallDrexx]

I've said this many times. My wife play the HELL out of some adventure games. If you brought the interactivity of an Adventure Company (tm) game, with dials, dialog trees, puzzles and such...that would be a great way to make quests better. Of course time (and therefore) money goes into the development of these deeper quests...but there you go...a new direction for MMOs.

A new direction, such as Myst: Uru Live? :P

I keep meaning to try it out but keep getting distracted by other games.  Everytime I see an ad for it when loading up gametap I always think "ooh that looks cool" but I then start playing the game I loaded up gametap to play and forget.

[Ratman_tf]

So you've listed a specific example of where PvP doesnt work to prove that all PvP, which you admit you generally like, doesnt work? That makes no sense. WoW battlegrounds wasnt what I was talking about. I still think that if less predictable, more sophisticated mob combat came about through human actors players would enjoy the more "lifelike" combat.

WoW is easily mastered. No amount of GM intervention, PvP or AI/player driven whatnot is going to cover the fact that after 2 weeks of playing WoW, you are as good a player as you are ever going to be.

And I think the "99% of player content is crap" saying applies to PvP participation. For every player or GM that provides an interesting combat experience, there will be 99 of them acting like idiots.

I also think we're onto a good point here about combat. If you play combat all the time, it gets boring. That's the nature of doing something over and over again. Now, if combats were spaced out, if there were less "trash mobs" and more puzzles and shit like Solid Snake or Zelda, there would be things for players to do instead of slowly burning out on whacking foozles all the live-long-day.

Also, there should be many more ways for players to "fail" in a MMORPG, that don't involve your character dying.

Personal opinion: I think I would avoid GM run mobs if they were in one of thses games. It doesn't sound like a very fun mechanic. YMMV.

[tmp]

Put another way, we're not talking about changing the rate of fire for mob guns from 30ms to 12ms. I'm talking about changing entire combat methods so it's more challenging and therefore more fun. It's about changing entire skillsets.

It still remains to be established that more challenging actually results in more fun. To take example from PvP side rather than PvE this time, there's seemingly huge appeal in "pwning noobs" i.e. one-shotting players who have no real chance to even hit you let alone fight back. Plenty people enjoy this kind of activity even though it yields them no in-game rewards and when participation in more challenging and equal fights could actually net them some virtual trinkets. If the challenge is supposedly more fun, why so many people go out of their way to avoid it and why absolute lack of challenge is apparently enjoyable to them?

edit: also to note, following the threads on boards like FoH etc, you can notice people recall fondly as "most fun" the absolutely overpowered and broken character builds/classes... stuff that'd allow them to mow the NPCs en masse with zero chance of dying. I don't recall single time someone would say "man so and so class was the best in diku_01, it was absolute bitch to kill anything and you never could be sure you'd live through the fight until you put 100% effort into play"

[tazelbain]

No, actually it doesn't. It's more than a higher DC rating...it's like getting a better DM. The NPC reacts differently entirely...and therefore can be more satisfying. I've played PnP games with good, great, and terrible DMs. And the story can come alive or it can fall on its face if every mob in every campaign plays the same way, or every story unfolds with the same plot devices. 

Put another way, we're not talking about changing the rate of fire for mob guns from 30ms to 12ms. I'm talking about changing entire combat methods so it's more challenging and therefore more fun. It's about changing entire skillsets.

First you say that we are taking about the same context.  And then you say we taking about something different. So, umm, ya...

Your comment seems to assume two things a) that difficulty cant = fun  b) some arbitrary definition of difficulty that sounds more like it means "too hard for players to figure out and is really just an auto-machine gun turret that insta-kills players" At least that's how it sounds to me.  

In the scope of RPG Combat Mechanics, Difficulty != fun.
In the scope of RPG Combat Mechanics, Difficulty == odds being stack against the players.
That is what I am saying.
If there no RPG Combat, I am sorry I thought we were talking about MMORPGs.

[DarkSign]

Ok. Guess all we need are mobs that spawn and stand there and put up a tiny fight back. Enough to where you whack them once get your xp and move on. Fuck making AI any better...ever. Let's just keep having the same crappy PvE experience we've been getting. Of course some of you are happy with the shit on a plate. (Odd since I said I had a higher tolerance for bullshit in another thread...but we're talking different categories here)

I find it amazing that someone would even argue that more challenging wouldn't mean more fun. You realize that there are difficulty ratings on games (Halo, ChessMaster, etc.) for a reason?

I guess it doesnt matter if your girlfriend doesnt have an orgasm if you get yours and it's too hard to give her hers? I mean who wants to work to achieve something if it's hard, right?

First you say that we are taking about the same context.  And then you say we taking about something different. So, umm, ya...

Uhm. No, I dont.  You cant seem to grasp the difference in merely changing orders of magnitude and changing entire methods of play style. It's not just changing a die roll. It's about playing against something that's more fun because...aww fuck it. I've already explained this 90 times. Time 91 wont be any different. Here's your ticket to the Shitbox360. Just try not to post any critiques of games where analysis is necessary.

EDIT: Amazing that in the thread below us (on RMT) people realize that achievement is of some sort of value, but difficulty (necessitating achievement) falls on deaf ears by some here.

[tmp]

I find it amazing that someone would even argue that more challenging wouldn't mean more fun. You realize that there are difficulty ratings on games (Halo, ChessMaster, etc.) for a reason?

I'd suggest revolutionary notion the difficulty settings are there because for some people fun = easy while for others fun = hard. I.e. they are labelled as "easy/normal/hard gameplay" rather than "shitty/mediocre/fun gameplay" precisely because there's no fixed correlation between challenge and fun that's universal for all. Consequently there's no guarantee that making game more challenging will make it more fun for all involved, or even the majority for that effect.

edit: the reverse is of course equally true. Making things trivial is given to piss off and bore part of your potential player base just the same.

[Margalis]

The history of PvE in MMOs is calling you a liar. If you look at the most popular activities in PvE, it generally involves finding the mob that gives the best reward for the easiest fight. We don't as a rule want to work hard, we want shinies to flow in with the minimum effort on our part.

Sadly I've got to agree with DreckSign on this one.

In most MMORPGs achievment itself is the fun part, so yes people try to maximize achievement. If *combat* were fun then people might actually go for fun encounters.

But furthermore that is irrelevant because you can increase difficulty across the board. There will always be more efficient ways to get XP but the most efficient ways could be much more "difficult" than they are today. I put difficult in quotes because I that isn't the best term, I think unpredictable and challenging are both better.

If you look at the threads we've done here about people's favorite experiences in these games, nearly every single one of them is when things happen out of the ordinary. If you were take the typical game today and just change the hate rules to make it a bit more random that would improve those games in a variety of ways. The problem now is that players try to achieve maximum predictability and control and rather than push back developers cater to them.

[tazelbain]

> It's about playing against something that's more fun because...aww fuck it.
The funniest part is you assume I disagree with you, when you don't have a position to agree with beyond "I want more challenge."  Great, I want more challenge too.  I was just point that I thought making Mob mathimatically tougher wasn't the way to do it.   What the fuck is more challenge mean in game terms?  Come on, no more hand-waving about "changing entire methods of play style" and "changing entire combat methods"  Those phrases mean nothing.  Then you call us out as sheep when we don't carte-blanche agree with your nebulous position.

Fine, have fun with that.

[tmp]

If you look at the threads we've done here about people's favorite experiences in these games, nearly every single one of them is when things happen out of the ordinary. If you were take the typical game today and just change the hate rules to make it a bit more random that would improve those games in a variety of ways. The problem now is that players try to achieve maximum predictability and control and rather than push back developers cater to them.

Out of ordinary fun doesn't necessarily equal extra random factor, if anything random is probably detrimental to fun precisely because it's unpredictable. Easy examples: imagine random skew to your bullets in FPS each time you press the trigger (random to degree you have no control over) or random deviation to direction/velocity when you go through portals in well, Portal. Would either make the game more fun? I'd argue the answer is "no" if just because there seems to be common complaint how "cone of fire" which introduces such random bullet skew in certain FPS-like games.... ruin the fun, not enhance it.

[DarkSign]

I've already given a few notes on what more challenge means. Generally I said that human operators would be better than AI. I'm assuming you're intelligent enough to know the differences between playing against a real person and a computer and can connect the dots. But I gave an example...targeting a healer (oddly that's kind of an outdated example since games have been doing that for awhile now).

I think Margalis hit the nail on the head when he said unpredictable. When you know what you're up against and exactly what the computers going to do, your response becomes repetitious...which leads to boring. When you've got something that you have to overcome, adapt, achieve against it's more thrilling when you win.

So perhaps just as there are those that like RMT and dont like RMT...there are those that would rather have boring yet predictable...and those that embrace challenge and achievement.

[Ratman_tf]

I'd suggest revolutionary notion the difficulty settings are there because for some people fun = easy while for others fun = hard. I.e. they are labelled as "easy/normal/hard gameplay" rather than "shitty/mediocre/fun gameplay" precisely because there's no fixed correlation between challenge and fun that's universal for all.

Yep. And if I have hit my wall of mastery, and some GM run monster smacks me down, there's no challenge to it. For whatever reason, I can't ever beat him, so I give up and go play WoW or Hellgate or whatever the fuck.

Easy play can be fun, and challenging play can be not-fun, depending on the mastery level of the player.

[DarkSign]

But to say that just because it's GM-run that it's crap is the problem Im having with several posters here.

Easy play can be fun, and challenging play can be not-fun, depending on the mastery level of the player.

That's absolutely true...and Im not denying that. But some of the people in this thread dont want to admit that challenging play can be fun too.
If it's not easy then it's not fun.

You've got to look at the GM-run characters like a player would...as in they wouldnt know they are GM run. That's seeming to be a bit hard, but we're all generally intelligent here. I guess the devil's in the details. Such characters would have a set level of weapon or skills and not necessarily overpowered. You'd think..hey those mobs look 34th level and the con yellow...I can probably take them. But the difference would be in the way they play.

Now this would arguably (and hopefully) make them harder than their level...but who's to say that the GM players would always win? Two ways they might not win include a) they are bested and b) they lose on purpose - part of a larger scheme and method they are administered to maintain. Make sense? It's never been done so I'm sure the method could be refined into fun. 

Again, It's not a question of power, its a method of delivering unpredictability. Perhaps the GM sends a character up a back flight of stairs and has him idle in the dark...to surprise the player? Or perhaps the GM ups the mobs hps so he can swim through lava...but the mob comes out with only enough hp to scare the player.

[IainC]

double post

[IainC]

I've already given a few notes on what more challenge means. Generally I said that human operators would be better than AI. I'm assuming you're intelligent enough to know the differences between playing against a real person and a computer and can connect the dots. But I gave an example...targeting a healer (oddly that's kind of an outdated example since games have been doing that for awhile now).

I think Margalis hit the nail on the head when he said unpredictable. When you know what you're up against and exactly what the computers going to do, your response becomes repetitious...which leads to boring. When you've got something that you have to overcome, adapt, achieve against it's more thrilling when you win.

So perhaps just as there are those that like RMT and dont like RMT...there are those that would rather have boring yet predictable...and those that embrace challenge and achievement.

Ok a few things.
Let's ignore the GM run monsters as impractical on any scale larger than a NWN module for your friends. So we want to make PvE more challenging? You suggest that this can be attained through randomness but I'd argue that just makes it more frustrating for the majority of players. More complex scripts? Sure but they'll be cracked before you know it and it won't be too long before the counter to all the AI triggers is known and players are sleepwalking through it. Take the Golestandt encounter in DAoC as an example, it had a pretty complex AI behaviour that would switch aggro, punish you for bunching up, punish you for spreading out and disrupt the interdependencies in the group. It didn't take long for people to map out how it worked and as soon as that was done the encounter got reduced to a long drawn out set of pavlovian responses.

Randomising stuff doesn't add challenge it adds frustration. Most games split PvE into two parts. Firstly there's the bread and butter stuff, the fields of random XP stuff that may or may not have some schtick to hit players with. Then there are the achievement encounters. Stuff that's hard to do, raid content for various definitions of raid. These are the ones with the challenging fights, the difficult skin of your teeth encounters. Some games provide this kind of experience at all character levels so you don't even need to wait till max level to hit the 'fun' PvE.

Guess what?

Players still go for the grind.

IainC's first law of MMO psychology is thus:

If there are two options in front of a player, one of which maximises fun and the second of which maximises reward then players will unerringly choose the latter. Are badly designed games at least partially to blame for this? Sure. But designers don't work blind. They have metrics from previous games that show how players in that game chose to spend their time, they look at what the guys in beta were doing. And you know, mostly players just want the reliable XP/gold/magic foozles not the 'OMG how did we make it through that?' experience. It's why players powerlevel rather than experience all the 'fun' content that devs implement, it's why random groups rarely hold together after a wipe.

People like you and I, who think more carefully about what we want out of games and like to see the horizons expanded, might seek out those more challenging encounters but we are nowhere near the middle of the bell curve.

[Ratman_tf]

If you want random, then thrown in some random scripts that will entertain the players. I've always thought it would be entertaining to catch some Orcs playing cards while waiting at their guard post. (Spawn point) It always frustrated me that the interesting boss encounters were locked away in WoW, behind the raid gate. Why not spread some of that fun out into the non-instanced world?

Granted, players will figure out ever permutation of system that gets thrown into a game, but that doesn't mean you have to throw your hands up in the air and fail to entertain them at all.

[tazelbain]

...say some stuff a lot like Theory of Fun...

So, any PvP will do  Battlegrounds to OpenPvP?
If AI actually had the I, that would acceptable?

From time to time, you'll hear me gush about Fort Aspenwood in Guild Wars for exactly the same reasons you describe.   There were many players on both sides using so many different builds and strategies, it stayed fresh for an extremely long time.

Another way of saying "your response becomes repetitious...which leads to boring" is the puzzle of killing was easily solved.  Putting players on both sides makes the puzzle more difficult, hence less boring.  Unfortunately PvP has other baggage (that we have also discussed here at length) and the market has been slow to embrace.  When I mentioned puzzles earlier you responded with a reference to adventures games which is not what I meant.  Combat itself should be treated like a puzzle along the lines of PotBS.  A good combat puzzle would go a ways to prevent you responses from becoming repetitious, while we wait for PvP to intergate into the market.  Of course coming up with a good puzzle is a talent on itself.

[DarkSign]

Just a short note before I read IainC's crit wall o' text:

I didnt say RANDOMNESS. (Margalis might have and I agreed with him but I never did)

I said unpredictability and backed it up with some human ideas (the idling in the dark for example) that weren't random, yet arguably unpredictable.

That is all. I'll read the rest now.

Thanks for the compliment btw.

EDIT: Wow. You really make a lot of sense there. Players do go for reward over fun. Im wondering if a game could still be made for those of us in the category of challenge-enjoyers...and if it would survive :D

[DarkSign]

...say some stuff a lot like Theory of Fun...

So, any PvP will do  Battlegrounds to OpenPvP?
If AI actually had the I, that would acceptable?

From time to time, you'll hear me gush about Fort Aspenwood in Guild Wars for exactly the same reasons you describe.   There were many players on both sides using so many different builds and strategies, it stayed fresh for an extremely long time.

Another way of saying "your response becomes repetitious...which leads to boring" is the puzzle of killing was easily solved.  Putting players on both sides makes the puzzle more difficult, hence less boring.  Unfortunately PvP has other baggage (that we have also discussed here at length) and the market has been slow to embrace.  When I mentioned puzzles earlier you responded with a reference to adventures games which is not what I meant.  Combat itself should be treated like a puzzle along the lines of PotBS.  A good combat puzzle would go a ways to prevent you responses from becoming repetitious, while we wait for PvP to intergate into the market.  Of course coming up with a good puzzle is a talent on itself.

I agree with that immensely. The puzzle of which you speak is essential to the real game being played. I loved figuring out what template would kill the "cookie-cutter of the week" in Shadowbane.  Put in your words, I think the human puzzle is more fulfilling than the computer AI one ;)

[IainC]

Im wondering if a game could still be made for those of us in the category of challenge-enjoyers...and if it would survive :D

The challenge in most MMOs isn't the gameplay itself but the metagames that surround it - the raid strats, the gear templates, the PvP group builds and the social networking. Any monkey can learn to press a button in response to trigger_event_01, gameplay by itself is not a challenge. Just as the MMO part of MMORPGs substitutes for content as compared to single player RPGs, it also takes up some of the 'challenge' slack too. I wrote a short piece on sort of that topic here.

[Abelian75]

EDIT: Wow. You really make a lot of sense there. Players do go for reward over fun. Im wondering if a game could still be made for those of us in the category of challenge-enjoyers...and if it would survive :D

Psuedo-nitpick (but actually an important distinction imho):  "challenge-enjoyer" is not the right term for the category you are putting yourself in.  A huge subset, probably the majority, of those players who enjoy challenging encounters/puzzles/what-have-you will STILL go for the easy reward, bypassing the challenge.  This is the critical, not-obvious-at-first-glance problem.  It's not that people ENJOY the easier path to the reward, necessarily.  They may indeed enjoy the challenging path much more, and find the easier route to the rewards boring.  But they will go the easier route regardless, for whatever reason.

I'm definitely in this camp, myself, though I'd love to pretend not to be... experience has proved otherwise.

[Venkman]

Not to repeat myself, but some of you are still missing the point. You don't take any current DIKU and make monsters unpredictable. That's a fail. Again, the entire game is designed to advance your character. Anything that slows it down becames the way the next game steals your players.

The slot machine analogy is not about the swingarm/payout. It's that PLUS the entire environment from the carpet to the drinks that get you there, support you trying, and keep you coming back. You don't try and get a non-gambler into slots by changing the probability of payouts. You try to find what they are into and create something NEW for them to repeatedly spend money on. Like, say, CCGs

With MMOs you need to change the goals of the game to change the paths to get there. You can even keep dumb AI if your game is about narrative and diplomacy with the occasional fight. Here thouh your character advancement can't be tied to mob XP. Makes you lazy, relying on kill collect "quests" on countless mobs that never change behavior (ooo this one poison).

Instead, if your serious about removing grinding ( and btw farming) to allow for real immovation, remove mob XP altogether going ALL narrative based. And remove levels from pvp calculations so there's no dumb barriers to entry that alienate your players before they get to what your game is about.

Otherwise, you're squarely against WoW.

[Jayce]

Regarding puzzles: earlier I said that MMOGs aren't cursed to suckiness - they're cursed to being MMOGs.  Puzzles aren't something that MMOGs do well.  AC1 had a puzzle of sorts (composing spells), and it was fun for the first month of beta, then the algorithm was cracked and it became trivial.  All that design work amounted to a month of frantic work by a fraction of the playerbase.

What MMOGs do well is provide ways to measure achievement.  Whether it's a PvP title, geographic space, epic equipment, or a house stocked with ingots or the bones of your enemies, that's what they do well.  The real question is, how do you get the players to work hard at something to achieve those things without making it just boil down to spending more time in-game than anyone else?  Or being a better twitch player?

[Venkman]

I agree with you, but that's the problem with derivation. We're in stasis until advancement-for-the-sake-of-advancement is expanded to include more than just this single motivation.

All hail the new year, and maybe something that's actually different. Unfortunately, what's on the docket of will-actually-launch is more of the same with tweaks.