Top 10 Favourite features from any MMO

[Signe]

I'm waiting for ATITD 4.  I wish they'd hurry.  I always play for a month or so when a new one comes out.  Bricks and Flax and learning gymnastics never gets old... well, at least for a month or so.

[Xanthippe]

I'm waiting for ATITD 4.  I wish they'd hurry.  I always play for a month or so when a new one comes out.  Bricks and Flax and learning gymnastics never gets old... well, at least for a month or so.

I ended up paying for ATITD3 for a year after I thought I'd quit.  I am going to skip 4, I think, unless they put in camel racing or paintball fights.

(Sure that's what I say now.  Come launch I'm sure I'll play at least for the first month.)

[Signe]

I don't know why they don't add paintball fights.  It's a natural! 

I also paid for ages after I quit and didn't catch it, and then two more months after I quit the second time.  He sent me two free t-shirts, though.  They're still in a box in the junk room, I think.

[Nebu]

If you two play, let me know.  I always enjoy the first few months of a telling.

[Xanthippe]

I don't know why they don't add paintball fights.  It's a natural! 

I also paid for ages after I quit and didn't catch it, and then two more months after I quit the second time.  He sent me two free t-shirts, though.  They're still in a box in the junk room, I think.

I got a shirt, too - it's one of my favorite tshirts, in fact.  Really nice logo, sand colored?

You should make up a contest and then award the tshirts as prizes (if you're not going to keep them)!

[Xanthippe]

If you two play, let me know.  I always enjoy the first few months of a telling.

Oh sure, you'll have a brick factory before I even get my shack built.  I know you!

I'll sign up, play a few days, not log in for weeks, then play a few days.  I'm starting to play like Signe for some reason.  Flitting from game to game and not really attached to any of them.

[Signe]

Yes, that's the shirt.  They were too big for Righ and no one else I know here has any idea what it is, so off to the junk room.  They are very nice quality, too.  I just don't wear t-shirts that say stuff on them, for some reason.  I'll try to find them.  You don't know how deep and mysterious my junk room is.  I'm even afraid to wander too far in.  There might be snakes.

I'll probably give 4 ago as soon as it starts up.  I've had no resolution to my AoC crashing problem but, well, like Xanthippe said, I'm not attached.  I USED to get attatched, but not any more.  I think Nebu might be more like us than not, actually.  I play HG:L every now and then, though.

We'll have to find Somebob and Slyfeind.

[Draegan]

I never got ATITD.  It's a crafting/socializing game in a desert right?

[schild]

I never got ATITD.  It's a crafting/socializing game in a desert right?

Monotony in the Desert. It's only fun playing with Nebu because he knows what he's doing. I really thought I'd love it because it's just crafting and building things, but you move so fucking slowly and shit takes forever. If they fixed that part of it - the slow as balls part - it might be worth looking into.

[eldaec]

You'd think building some sort of teleport infrastructure is exactly the sort of community project that ATITD would be all over.

Espeicially if everytime some used it the teleport booths would randomly pk some nearby flax.

[Signe]

I never got ATITD.  It's a crafting/socializing game in a desert right?

Monotony in the Desert. It's only fun playing with Nebu because he knows what he's doing. I really thought I'd love it because it's just crafting and building things, but you move so fucking slowly and shit takes forever. If they fixed that part of it - the slow as balls part - it might be worth looking into.

This is why I can only play for a month or so.  I have never been able to do all the learning, either, because I get tired of running for so long.  If it wasn't for being able to learn things from other players, I wouldn't last a week.

[Ratman_tf]

Sly sits there and breeds beetles all day. I like me crafting games, but god damn. Breeding beetles. You can't even breed giant warrior beetles that can attack other players. 

[lamaros]

Why are people talking about ATITD? It's obviously not a MMO, because combat is what MMOs are about.

[Signe]

I can fight with people anywhere. 

[lamaros]

Edit: I think I misunderstood signe!

[tazelbain]

I don't want to dig ditches, online or offline.

[Nebu]

I think ATitD is the ultimate in PvP.  You don't have to kill another player in combat to defeat them.  Hell, if you're a demi-pharoah, you can just banish them. 

In theory, the game is very deep and interesting.  In reality, it's little more than an exercise in spreadsheet/wiki wankery. 

[TheWall]

1. UO's criminal system for pvp which allowed the general public to police itself. You want to be a thief or a murderer? Go for it. Negative actions against another player flag you as a criminal and then anyone can attack you freely for a time. Murder enough people and you go perma-red. Guards attack you on sight in every major town and everyone in game can attack you with no criminal penalty. It was great. Life as a red was exciting.

2. UO & Eve's sandbox world. Give me MORE ways to interact with other players not less. Players are what make the game an MMO not quests.

3. DAOC's RVR combat system. Multiple factions duking it out is way more fun than just two. The Keep sieging with a benefit to your entire realm for your success was a great way to get people out there. Skills gained through pvp was also fun.

4. WoW's AH and Mail system. Finally I can get stuff quickly and pass gear between my alts without worrying about being robbed by random guy who is helping me move my stuff around.

5. UO housing. How else was I going to make $1000 from selling a castle on ebay? Seriously.

6. COH character creation. Nothing else like it anywhere. Play till you get your travel powers (end game, you won!) then make another toon.

7. UO's inventory/gold system. Nothing better than loading up a bunch of pack horses with all the gold you need to buy a keep and then begging your guild to escort you to town to buy the deed. Checks ruined all that fun! conversely running into someone else doing the same thing was an instant payday! 

8. UO's non-gear dependency. Yes gear was nice and important but if you got completely murdered and robbed it didn't take all that much to get back on your feet. Plus, even without armor you could defend yourself. Naked perma-red mages!

9. EvE's offline skilling and time card purchase with in game money. I haven't actively played EvE in months but I'm still progressing towards being a dread pilot and its not costing me any real money to do so. I wonder though if I'll ever play actively again. Seems like I enjoy the idea of progressing more than actually playing the game.

10. DAOC's PvP server. Getting XP for killing players!!! I was in hog heaven. I found myself leveling up far faster than I wanted. I kept having to find new crafters for gear because you only got coin off of people.



I'm sure EQ and SWG could have made my list but I only ever tried them for a month. I started too late in the game for those titles and didn't feel like battling the learning curve.

[Koyasha]

7.  Here's a real WoW feature I liked - faction mattered immensely.  Hell, the PvE game and questing path (aside from the overlaps) was unique.  You couldn't go into some areas or cities without being auto aggroing every NPC and PC.  You couldn't even communicate with the other side.  Has any other game done that to this degree?  That is not a rhetorical question, I actually do not even know.

I have to disagree with the idea that factions in WoW are significant.  They're pretty much just another bar to grind up to get another set of rewards.  There are almost no cases of a place where things are hostile to you and you can actually work your faction up and make them friendly (there's the Timbermaw, and...pretty sure that's it).  There's places where things are unfriendly, or won't deal with you, but the Timbermaw is the only one I can think of where you can go from kill on sight to friendly.  Oh, wait....Bloodsail Pirates faction.  Yeah, them too.  And you get...a hat.  And lose access to like 6 cities of considerable importance.  Also you can't change your allegiance in any way, as a human can't ever become KOS in Stormwind or friendly in any city they start out KOS in.  To an Alliance player, a Horde city is no different than any other monster spawn area, except there's no rewards to be had by killing there.

The only game I've personally played that had a robust faction system was EQ, where a character could murder their own city people and become hated by their hometown, at the same time becoming liked by their traditional racial enemies, and any variety of combinations.  Some people went to great effort to have characters that could go into many cities, by building up their faction.  There were some limits, and some cities and factions simply had no way to build them up, or there was an upper limit on how far you could get if you were a certain race - I don't think, for example, that a Dark Elf could ever build up enough faction to walk around in Felwithe (High Elf city).  But they could, in Kelethin (Wood Elf city).  Likewise, my Bard was max faction with every faction in Neriak (Dark Elf city) that could be built up.  There were certain areas she had to avoid, like the Necromancer guild, but for the most part, she could walk around Neriak if she wanted to.  Or there was Froglok faction, which allowed one to walk around the dungeon of Upper Guk unmolested, since it was inhabited by Frogloks.  Factions of normally 'enemy' creatures were common, allowing certain individuals to walk around in what most of the population viewed as monster dungeons.  Some of them even had shops and other functionality, such as Runnyeye Citadel - with sufficient Runnyeye Goblin faction, there was a banker and a shop one could use in that zone.

Factions were brought to their best point in the Velious Age, where one had to make a choice between the Giants, or the Dragons and Dwarves, which were enemies of the Giants, and there were numerous other interesting factions of less global significance.  It never got as far as it should have, and Luclin tried to do even more, but the company reorganization or whatever they had there that screwed up half that expansion pretty much broke the excellent plans they seemed to have for Luclin factions.  Even so, Luclin still showed a robust and interconnected faction system between Shar Vahl, the Shadweavers, the Grimlings, the Vampyr, and the two Combine factions of Katta Castellum and Sanctus Seru.  It just had gaping holes and broken connections where things never got implemented as originally planned, since whole swaths of that expansion were redesigned.

Factions in the Planar Age and beyond functioned considerably less this way.  In some expansions, faction was rendered almost completely irrelevant - in the Planar Age, for example.  I'm trying to recall much of anything where factions were relevant in PoP, and not thinking of any examples.  Although there were still the occasional interesting faction which you could maintain.  Most notably the faction which you lose by killing the auto-KOS inhabitants of the Halls of Honor.  If you get by without ever killing anything there, and enter the Temple of Marr, the entire zone is friendly.  But there's no way to ever repair that faction, and killing a single creature in the Halls of Honor is enough to destroy it forever.  Beyond that, there's no real purpose in maintaining the faction, as there's absolutely nothing of use IN the Temple of Marr.  Its only purpose is a raid zone, and the only reason to maintain the faction is to have a character that can help raids recover by being able to walk around there with impunity.

I believe the faction system of early EQ is one of the best and sadly, least replicated systems in the MMOG world, and even EQ has mostly phased out the excellent use of factions they had in the early days, making factions have little to no real purpose anymore.  There are many things on my favorites list from EQ, but if any of them are truly appropriate in almost any game, and yet have rarely or never been seen beyond EQ, it's the faction system.  I believe that Anarchy Online may have had a similar faction system, but I don't know personally as my experience with that game was very limited.

[Draegan]

Now that's a long post on EQ factions.

[lamaros]

WoW's Horde/Allicance faction breakdown is one of the stupidest things in the game. It serves single player only, as evidenced by the fact that most of the stuff becomes shared at some point anyway (Argent Dawn, Shatt, so on). It just means that the server community is cut in half and that they have to double up on content; content which will only ever be seen by 50% of the players (higher due to players who have both horde and alliance characters, but not a lot higher I'd guess: I personaly haven't hit 70 on any Alliance character).

Apart from that breakdown WoW just uses Factions (with a couple of exceptions) as grinds.

I never played EQ, but it sounds like its faction system would have made it to my top 10 features if I did.

If we're going to go back into mud (for Ralph) features for this I'd also include:

Player Run Cities/Guilds - Achaea: Rudimentary and no doubt done better elsewhere, but this was the best example in my personal experience. Every city in the game was run by players, with the ruling council/whatever setting guard behaviours, market prices, city enemies, and a number of other things. Guilds, by which I mean class guilds, were also player run and I had great fun being a officertype in one of the guilds and writing up the membership rules with others in the leadership, controling distribution of poisions (which was a guild monopoly) in the economy, and having to hunt down the guildmembers who were stealing poisions from us.

Multiclassing - Medievia: Multiclassing in Medievia was a case of level to 31 and then reroll as another class, gaining you old class skills as you reach the level you got them as in your new one. Only once you have multiclassed through all 4 classes did you reach the end of the leveling process. I'm not a huge fan of leveling, but this is the best way I've experienced it. The good things about this is that you reuse content 4 times, you become more powerful with each class, but the difference between a level 30 single classes and a level 24 (117 overall) quadclasser is not so clearcut. And you could reroll your final class at any time in order to redefine your character a bit.

[Ratman_tf]

1. UO's criminal system for pvp which allowed the general public to police itself. You want to be a thief or a murderer? Go for it. Negative actions against another player flag you as a criminal and then anyone can attack you freely for a time. Murder enough people and you go perma-red. Guards attack you on sight in every major town and everyone in game can attack you with no criminal penalty. It was great. Life as a red was exciting.

Notoriety got metagamed to hell and back and was never a sucessful way for players to police themselves. The whole concept of Noto-PKs showed that.

[Margalis]

In another way -- would adding the text log to FPS game make that FPS more fun? Or adding it to GTA? Or to Tekken? Mario? Harvest Moon? Need For Speed? MGS? If all these games can do well without it... why are the MMOs clinging to this crutch from the ancient times when the text feedback was simply the only source of feedback available?

"You hit Nina Williams with a hopkick, jab, jab, top spinner. She takes 50 damage!"

You are exactly right, the on-screen logs exist because of a mindset. Yes, players can parse them, but they could easily just be written to disk if they are simply debug/info tools and not really part of the game.

MMO devs are still making spreadsheets with graphics. And logs are a safety net - if you have shitty icons and shitty spell effect and incompehensible animations you can always think "well hey, if they want to know exactly what happened they can always read the log!"

[Sunbury]

When is the game going to come that does away with all that crap on the screen (toolbar icons, N chat boxes, enemy/group member boxes with damage bars, compasses, mini-maps, etc etc), or why do they even bother with a 3d display?

Don't even get me started on / commands.

How about a control system where you control your character, and only see the 3d environment?  Anything done in game should be by moving your characters hands, or speaking. 

And I'm not talking about doing X-O-Up-Down-Left-Right to activate a 'combo', but special attacks are the result of direct use of your control of your character's positions and motions.

Again, I'm not saying every game should try this ... but how about 1?

[TheWall]

1. UO's criminal system for pvp which allowed the general public to police itself. You want to be a thief or a murderer? Go for it. Negative actions against another player flag you as a criminal and then anyone can attack you freely for a time. Murder enough people and you go perma-red. Guards attack you on sight in every major town and everyone in game can attack you with no criminal penalty. It was great. Life as a red was exciting.

Notoriety got metagamed to hell and back and was never a sucessful way for players to police themselves. The whole concept of Noto-PKs showed that.

Are you talking about the whole Glorious vs Dread Lord/Lady thing? Because that has very little to do with what I was talking about. Karma was just a metagame. But the system of flagging based on criminal actions was very well done.

[Endie]

In another way -- would adding the text log to FPS game make that FPS more fun? Or adding it to GTA? Or to Tekken? Mario? Harvest Moon? Need For Speed? MGS? If all these games can do well without it... why are the MMOs clinging to this crutch from the ancient times when the text feedback was simply the only source of feedback available?

"You hit Nina Williams with a hopkick, jab, jab, top spinner. She takes 50 damage!"

You are exactly right, the on-screen logs exist because of a mindset. Yes, players can parse them, but they could easily just be written to disk if they are simply debug/info tools and not really part of the game.

MMO devs are still making spreadsheets with graphics. And logs are a safety net - if you have shitty icons and shitty spell effect and incompehensible animations you can always think "well hey, if they want to know exactly what happened they can always read the log!"

You can safely bet that within a week or so someone would have written an app (or an add-on, if your interface supports them) that sits discretely on-screen and lets you view a parsed version of the log in real-time, so people can see what is working.

[Cyrrex]

7.  Here's a real WoW feature I liked - faction mattered immensely.  Hell, the PvE game and questing path (aside from the overlaps) was unique.  You couldn't go into some areas or cities without being auto aggroing every NPC and PC.  You couldn't even communicate with the other side.  Has any other game done that to this degree?  That is not a rhetorical question, I actually do not even know.

...Loads of stuff about EQ

I may have used the wrong word...I was thinking of Alliance vs. Horde "factions", not all the piddly sub-factions.

[dwindlehop]

Eve - movement and combat tightly integrated. always be moving during combat.
Eve - skill system and offline advancement (only reason I keep playing)
Eve - combat dice rolls dependent on combat circumstances (range, transversal velocity) in addition to equipment and avatar power
FFXI/SB - melee powers. i don't like the timers, though. i think probably there are better examples of this that I haven't played. D&D 4ed seems to be a great version of what I like, so probably WoW is too. I just haven't played WoW. It sounds like AoC is on the right track here, but I haven't played that either.
FFXI - itemization, different nifty weapons that do unique things. Really I like Diablo. Really really I like rogue-likes like Angband or Tales of Middle Earth. 15 different damage types. YES.
Eve - power curve between new players and maxed out players. They have a pretty good balance between new players being able to affect old players and old players being able to develop niche profiles.
UO - chat on your head, not in a channel. The 21st century version would be voice chat with a volume falloff. yes it was irritating, but it was also more world-defining.
Eve- chat channels. Give me full IRC, thanks.
Eve - single shard.
Eve- separation of combat movement (ship velocity) and combat escape (warp drive, jumpgates). I'd like to see even more separation here in that fast characters shouldn't always be able to escape a bad combat easiest.
Eve - factional warfare. This is the best expression of an idea I had a long time ago, inspired by WoTMUD, that a MMOG should have world PvP organized along character racial lines. It remains to be seen if I'll be able to raid Jita, but I'd like to.

[Slyfeind]

I think ATitD is the ultimate in PvP.  You don't have to kill another player in combat to defeat them.  Hell, if you're a demi-pharoah, you can just banish them. 

In theory, the game is very deep and interesting.  In reality, it's little more than an exercise in spreadsheet/wiki wankery. 

It was interesting when people wanted to build a society, because there were conflicts and shit storms and witch hunts all the time. Now everybody just wants to build things, and that means cooperation, and that's not a fun game without NPCs to bash.

[Ratman_tf]

1. UO's criminal system for pvp which allowed the general public to police itself. You want to be a thief or a murderer? Go for it. Negative actions against another player flag you as a criminal and then anyone can attack you freely for a time. Murder enough people and you go perma-red. Guards attack you on sight in every major town and everyone in game can attack you with no criminal penalty. It was great. Life as a red was exciting.

Notoriety got metagamed to hell and back and was never a sucessful way for players to police themselves. The whole concept of Noto-PKs showed that.

Are you talking about the whole Glorious vs Dread Lord/Lady thing? Because that has very little to do with what I was talking about. Karma was just a metagame. But the system of flagging based on criminal actions was very well done.

I'm talking about the whole shebang. Flagging grey was metagamed too. You could be trying to pickpocket your own housekey from someone who PKed you earlier. (for a hypothetical) And get ganked by some dude walking by who didn't know why you were doing that. Or use that as an excuse.

As a system for tracking intention, it sucked ass. Better to just toss it aside (I did) and kill whomever you fancy, and then macro off the notoriety loss.

[Bunk]

I prefered Darktide's system. To survive, you had to belong to a guild. Guilds quickly developed a reputation. If you did something that didn't fit in with your guild's rep, someone would tell your guild leader about it. Either you stopped doing those things, or dropped out of your guild and went to join Blood. 98% of the player base new the name and reputation of 90% of the guilds. You had to.

It was the ultimate in player run justice, because there really were no rules to govern it.

Do I think it could appear sucessfully in a game again? Probably not.

[Endie]

I prefered Darktide's system. To survive, you had to belong to a guild. Guilds quickly developed a reputation. If you did something that didn't fit in with your guild's rep, someone would tell your guild leader about it. Either you stopped doing those things, or dropped out of your guild and went to join Blood. 98% of the player base new the name and reputation of 90% of the guilds. You had to.

It was the ultimate in player run justice, because there really were no rules to govern it.

Do I think it could appear sucessfully in a game again? Probably not.

It exists in Eve.  Obviously, tiny unimportant corps and alliances will get away with stuff on the fringes, but basically people know what to expect when dealing with given (major) alliances, whether that be goons, RA, CVA or whoever.  That covers not just their attitudes to PvP, and whther they'll PK anyone they come across in lowsec or 0.0, but also the notable griefers, scammers or cheats.

[photek]

Alright guys, all feedback up to here has been gathered and noted. This was also posted on other forums and it was a survey for my company on which features MMO players favorized and how we can use that in our future game design and evolve them further or use them as inspirational guidelines. Thanks a lot for your time, you may now continue the discussion

[UnSub]

favorized

That's not a word.

On a separate note: release a summary report of the most favoured systems within MMOs. And link those other threads so we can compare comments.

[Adam Tiler]

Paraphrased from this post on Mahogany Finish.

EVE -- Single-Server Structure

EVE -- Free for All PvP (no hard factions except player-created ones); see Kings of the Hill and Because It’s Not Over Until I Say It’s Over.

EVE and UO -- Player-Driven Economy; Absolutely essential. The more precious resources are available outside the reach of the law’s long arm, but to prevent radical inflation in the newbie market (as seen in World of Warcraft and elsewhere), lower-tier resources remain a necessity in “end game” crafting. All but perhaps a few items awarded for participation in one-time-only events can be crafted by players. Newbie quests may award final products, but most equipment is left behind upon dying. Most quests simply award money. There are no NPC vendors.

EVE, UO, Shadowbane, others -- severe death penalty in some form.

EVE, UO -- Shallow character advancement; i.e. skill system. New players can contribute to most aspects of gameplay early on, while advanced players can specialize. Nobody is so advanced that they become immune to lowbie attacks, or so advanced that basic items become useless.

Tale in the Desert -- crafting system.

WAR -- Tome of Knowledge (of course).

WoW -- tutorial. Pretty much sums up the entire game; ridiculously accessible, simple, basically fun. I prefer my games with a LOT more depth, but WoW nailed the tutorial. I thought Tortage was too long, and the heavy private instancing meant that newbies were kind of shocked when they set foot on the mainland (people can kill me now?!?).

EVE -- going to borrow from Dwindlehop

movement and combat tightly integrated. always be moving during combat... separation of combat movement (ship velocity) and combat escape (warp drive, jumpgates).

Vanguard -- massive NON-INSTANCED dungeons. The dungeons in Vanguard absolutely blew my mind. The level of detail, the size, the sheer spectacle, and none of them were instanced. Groups shared the dungeons but could trigger bosses keyed to them on distinct advancement paths. I could go on and on about even some of the lowbie dungeons.

Runner-ups
-----------------------------

Vanguard -- unique classes (bards compose music, necromancers assemble their golems from dead body parts, etc.); I'm not in favor of a class-based system, I just thought Vanguard's classes were extremely well-implemented when I played recently.

EVE -- interface. I love how much information you can get if you know your way around it. The obvious trouble is that the deluge of options and information is overwhelming even to players who have been in the game for months.

WoW -- interface. Perfect for a game in which you don't need a ton of information to play well, with easy modification for those who want more.

EVE, WoW -- built-in voice chat. EVE's is somewhat better than WoW's, in my experience, but both are simple enough and you can understand people at the other end.

EQ2 -- zone art and layout.

That's it, I think. All you people who put meaningful, world-changing PvP and WoW's battlegrounds in the same list should be ashamed of yourselves.