Star Trek Online: Here We Go Again!

[Slyfeind]

As for being in the minority, I definitely agree. I'd like to see the MMO market one day expand to the point where making decent games is once again a profitable endeavor.

Yeah, except long travel time by itself is not a defining factor of a decent game, if that's what you're getting at. Fun travel time is good. Exciting travel time is good. Entertaining, eventful, peaceful, restful, breathtaking, engaging, meditative...those are all kinds of travel times that can improve most games.

Merely "long" travel time is not fun, and I think that's what people are getting at.

[taolurker]

Good god. I just had a client CTD when I was literally doing nothing -- standing on a starbase with a vendor window open.

Then I noticed this in my system tray:



Over an hour to upload a crash dump? Really?

OMG look at how many bytes that is. Memory Leak anyone?

[GenVec]

As for being in the minority, I definitely agree. I'd like to see the MMO market one day expand to the point where making decent games is once again a profitable endeavor.

Yeah, except long travel time by itself is not a defining factor of a decent game, if that's what you're getting at.

That's really not what I was getting at, at all.

STO suffers from a number of flaws which, in my opinion, arise from the ever-increasing desire to make a game that caters to everybody (and usually ends up catering to no one).

-The PvP is meaningless and repetitive
-There is zero exploration
-There are significant barriers to socialization (in the form of high instancing, lack of group-level challenges, and the high level of solo content)
- Few incentives to treadmill

I think a Star Trek MMO would have fared significantly better if Cryptic had attempted a virtual world style of game, rather than an on-the-rails space shooter. I see very little appeal to renew a subscription beyond the basic Star Trek IP. There are, of course, a boatload of "next Update!" promises, which is a practice that Cryptic has really raised to the level of performance art.

[Ratman_tf]

Good god. I just had a client CTD when I was literally doing nothing -- standing on a starbase with a vendor window open.

Then I noticed this in my system tray:



Over an hour to upload a crash dump? Really?

[Pennilenko]

I really want to like this game, I have an urge to get my trek on. It is to empty for me, I could get over that except that it is unstable as shit, constant crashes and other problems. I wont give them another month.

[Margalis]

This pretty much sums everything up.  WoW is a game. 

The thing is taken purely as a game WoW is shitty. The graphics are awful, the combat is awful, the story is awful, the pacing is awful. Taken purely as a game every MMO is fairly sad.

Pushing too far into game territory invites unflattering comparisons with real games, especially as the free online components of games expand.

[Sheepherder]

That's really not what I was getting at, at all.

Okay, so we can dismiss you as fucking insane.

There is no room for long travel time in a virtual world either, unless you do something with that travel time which makes it something other than travel time.  At some point people are going to ask themselves whether it's fun.

[Ghambit]

Star Trek w/o the "Trek" is a bit... uhhh... ridiculous, dont ya' think?

[Furiously]

Voyager was all about the trek and pretty universally despised.

[GenVec]

As someone mentioned above, distance and time can be not just atmospheric additions to the game, but strategic and cultural as well. Nowhere is this more obvious than Eve.

If you'll read the post again, you'll notice that the problem is that you think travel is nothing more than "walking from point A to point B". It's a terribly simplistic way of looking at it. To quote an old phrase, "It's just as much about the journey as it is the destination."

Okay, so we can dismiss you as fucking insane.
There is no room for long travel time in a virtual world either, unless you do something with that travel time which makes it something other than travel time.

I don't know if I can write this any more simply for you. "Distance is good if travel is more than just a time sink." Glad to know we're all on the same page.

[Malakili]

Voyager was all about the trek and pretty universally despised.

That was my favorite series 

[Rendakor]

Voyager had Jeri Ryan in a skin-tight ship suit.

[Ghambit]

Voyager was all about the trek and pretty universally despised.

That was my favorite series 

Voyager was not "universally" despised.  It was not well liked in comparison to other series and non-trekkers probably didnt like it at all, but to say it was "universally despised" is categorically wrong.

[Engels]

Ya, once a trekkie, just about any iteration goes down ok. Sorta like pizza. I personally liked Enterprise more than Voyager, and that's odd, since most people suppress a gag reflex when Enterprise is even brought up.

One should not dismiss schild's comments simply because he's a non-trekkie miscreant. TV shows may have had 'trekking' as part of the adventure, but they didn't spend 3 hours showing Scotty peering at gauges the entire trip from Nimbus 3 to Blooboob 12. The same rules have to apply to MMOs. They have to provide the illusion and immersion of epic travel while simultaneously not boring the player. Fuck if I know how to accomplish that, especially since in this day and age anything like the trip from Freeport to Qeynos would be grounds for immediate dismissal of an MMO developer.

[Malakili]

Ya, once a trekkie, just about any iteration goes down ok. Sorta like pizza. I personally liked Enterprise more than Voyager, and that's odd, since most people suppress a gag reflex when Enterprise is even brought up.

One should not dismiss schild's comments simply because he's a non-trekkie miscreant. TV shows may have had 'trekking' as part of the adventure, but they didn't spend 3 hours showing Scotty peering at gauges the entire trip from Nimbus 3 to Blooboob 12. The same rules have to apply to MMOs. They have to provide the illusion and immersion of epic travel while simultaneously not boring the player. Fuck if I know how to accomplish that, especially since in this day and age anything like the trip from Freeport to Qeynos would be grounds for immediate dismissal of an MMO developer.

Hell, I am no way a trekkie, and its probably one of the reasons I thought this game was such crap.  It seems like a lot of the appeal is "Oooooh, Trek! The game might suck, but ooh trek will keep me going for a month!"  Honestly, the game has about 0 redeeming features as far as I am concerned.    The answer, incidentally, is to be true to the IP you are using.  If an IP makes for a "boring" game, don't make the game, or make it for a small audience who is going to want that type of game that most find boring.  The real problem is they tried to make Trek into a game that appeals to the WoW player.

Shit, maybe their way will get them more long term subscribers, who knows, but we've said it a million times, you aren't going to make the next hit game by being WoW but not.   EVE does travel fine, I don't see why this couldn't be a model for Trek, aside from the obvious lore differences (warp drives v. jump gates for interstellar travel).   Most people that complain about EVE don't pick travel time as their reason for hating it, so I don't think we can use EVE marginal popular status as grounds for dismissing the idea.

Anyway, I'm definitely off the MMO train for a while, at least the MMORPG train (I'd consider MMOFPS).  I've tried everything and anything with hopes of something sticking, and nothing has since EVE and WoW, and even games that are the best of their genre can't keep me entertained forever.   This is why I'm currently playing RTS and FPS games.

[Tannhauser]

You couldn't be more wrong if your last name was Wrong, and you lived on Wrong street in Wrongville, USA.  Cryptic didn't make a WoW imitator or did WoW have galleys firing cannons?  That's just lazy analysis.  Cryptic made a quickie MMO copy of PoTBS but in space with Trek laid on top of it.  They know they don't have the talent or resources Blizzard does, so they knock out a MMO once a year, get some box sales and move on.  Hate to say it, but seems like a solid plan to me.

STO has a lot of bugs and other problems but I like it and will continue to play it.    In a month?  We'll see, but then that's why I only ever buy monthly. 

[Malakili]

You couldn't be more wrong if your last name was Wrong, and you lived on Wrong street in Wrongville, USA.  Cryptic didn't make a WoW imitator or did WoW have galleys firing cannons? 
STO has a lot of bugs and other problems but I like it and will continue to play it.    In a month?  We'll see, but then that's why I only ever buy monthly. 

To me quest grinder = wow, that is what WoW brought that was new, and its what everyone has tried since.  The specifics of the combat mechanics don't really interest me that much, as quite frankly combat mechanics aren't what people go to MMORPGs for in the first place.  If it was something significantly different, like an MMOFPS, then it might matter.   Whether I'm hitting goblins with a mace, or shooting lasers at starships is basically irrelevant as far as I am concerned.

[Khaldun]

Sidejack: premise of Voyager was  . Execution was 

[UnSub]

One should not dismiss schild's comments simply because he's a non-trekkie miscreant. TV shows may have had 'trekking' as part of the adventure, but they didn't spend 3 hours showing Scotty peering at gauges the entire trip from Nimbus 3 to Blooboob 12. The same rules have to apply to MMOs. They have to provide the illusion and immersion of epic travel while simultaneously not boring the player. Fuck if I know how to accomplish that, especially since in this day and age anything like the trip from Freeport to Qeynos would be grounds for immediate dismissal of an MMO developer.

I think STO did this pretty well - instead of spending time waiting to find something, the instancing means that you quickly move from Sector Space to something happening (and seeing people complain that Sector Space travel is too long makes me thankful I don't have to try to please MMO players as my job).

I think STO would have benefited from a diplomacy system and more exploration, but the reality is that exploration can be all about spending a lot of time only to find absolutely nothing meaningful (to the explorer in question, who may just be out sight-seeing, or may be looking for resources or something else). Of course, I've long since moved past the time where I could be some kind of virtual Burke and Wills - I want my sessions to feel vaguely productive.

[HaemishM]

Fuck if I know how to accomplish that, especially since in this day and age anything like the trip from Freeport to Qeynos would be grounds for immediate dismissal of an MMO developer.

There are a few ways to look at the travel times from Freeport to Qeynos. If the whole trip had been walking along a road, it would have been boring as shit. Part of the thing that made that trip exciting was the very real possibility that one could die at any point along the way, made more frightening by the fuckstupid death penalty. The fear of dying? Good. The fear of losing all your shit in an area an hour away from where you spawn that's filled with mobs you couldn't kill WITH all your gear, much less by yourself? NOT FUN. So for that, the death penalty was the part that fucking sucked, not the travel - having "graveyards" scattered along the way like WoW or LotRO does certainly helps those travel times, as well as not losing all your shit when you die. Yes, this means people can graveyard hop from one side of the continent to the other. That's an acceptable exploit, IMO.

One of the other things that made the trip more than needless tedium was the very real possibility that one could discover something few people had seen. In the days before rampant spoilers, this was a real possibility. It could be quest givers sitting out in the middle of nowhere, or an awesome-looking place like Highpass Hold, or the Aviak village, or the dungeon of Befallen, or that asshole Dark Elf who used to chase you around and instakill you, or even the tunnel that became such a hub of commerce purely by spontaneous community action. Scatter your long travel times with shit that's interesting, minus such a horrific death penalty and you have the option for interesting travel time that isn't tedium.

But, and this is the key, if that travel time has to be a constant factor every time you log on, especially if one of those factors is "how do I get with my group of friends/guild/party in a reasonable amount of time before I have to log off" your travel time blows monkeys. At some point in the player's progression through the world, there has to be ways to shortcut the travel times through some means. It can be a social thing (druids/wizards offering ports), it can be a mechanic (swift travel pony rides/boat rides/NPC teleporters, class rewards), or it can be done through instancting with the ability for members of a party to gather quickly at the point of interest (LotRO campfires, certain classes getting summon party member spells). Travel times with even the most interesting content become tedium when all the player wants to do is get with their buddies and gank shit.

An MMOG has to offer players the option of interesting travel time or convenience. If most of the players choose convenience, that's ok. THEY ARE PAYING YOU.

[Malakili]

[

But, and this is the key, if that travel time has to be a constant factor every time you log on,

This is a useful distinction.  In a game like EVE, traveling across the galaxy can definitely be prohibitive in terms of time.  However, most of the time, you don't really need to travel very far away from wherever your base of operations is.    In terms of playing together with friends, as long as you can get people playing in the same area, you'll never be too far away from each other.  So, here, we have relatively long travel times, but you only really need to do it once for any given place you are "living" out of.

In a game like WoW the precedent is set for the entire game world being "available" at any given time.  The result is, if you can't get somewhere quickly, it seems like a pretty big imposition.  Its gotten better of course too.  I remember back when I was raiding AQ40 regularly, I would make sure I logged in 30 minutes before I had to be there so I could teleport: moonglade and then fly down. (Which wasn't the fastest way there, but I could do it AFK).   Now, 30 minutes is really not a big deal to me, but I bet people would get pretty upset about such a travel time now if they had to do it every day.

[Kovacs]

Of course, I've long since moved past the time where I could be some kind of virtual Burke and Wills - I want my sessions to feel vaguely productive.

Yeah liked Kirk, seemed like a decent IP to me but being fair Cryptic is well on their way to making a science of predictably horrible games that may or may not be better'ish at some point.  And in my opinion trading Burke and Wills for Vladimir and Estragon isn't necessarily trading up.

[Draegan]

Haem hit it on the head.  When you are traveling and crazy shit can happen; that's cool.  Finding new mobs, new quests or undiscovered holes that no one has ever seen is cool.

Today's MMOGs have their whole game in a strategy guide or on a website while it's in beta.  That takes the the mystery away (if that initial mystery was fun to begin with anyway).

Traveling is a sharp edge.  Instant travel or too easy travel shrinks your world and makes it less of an immersive game, and just a game (which is fine if that's where you want to go).  Very long travel times make it annoying for players.  Gotta balance that shit yo.

[Koyasha]

Fuck if I know how to accomplish that, especially since in this day and age anything like the trip from Freeport to Qeynos would be grounds for immediate dismissal of an MMO developer.

There are a few ways to look at the travel times from Freeport to Qeynos. If the whole trip had been walking along a road, it would have been boring as shit. Part of the thing that made that trip exciting was the very real possibility that one could die at any point along the way, made more frightening by the fuckstupid death penalty. The fear of dying? Good. The fear of losing all your shit in an area an hour away from where you spawn that's filled with mobs you couldn't kill WITH all your gear, much less by yourself? NOT FUN. So for that, the death penalty was the part that fucking sucked, not the travel - having "graveyards" scattered along the way like WoW or LotRO does certainly helps those travel times, as well as not losing all your shit when you die. Yes, this means people can graveyard hop from one side of the continent to the other. That's an acceptable exploit, IMO.

The problem is that at least in my experience, the removal of those things you term not fun makes the entire experience dull.  My first trip from Freeport to Qeynos was an epic journey that I still remember parts of in vivid detail.  First time I looked out over Eastern Karana, first time I saw a cyclops and even from a distance was actually scared of it and so on.  I still look back and wonder how the hell I survived that trip - sheer luck.

What I don't remember, was my first trip from Darnassus to Stormwind.  I disticntly recall it being annoying.  I remember I didn't know about the tram, so I went via the land-route that led me through the highest level zones in the game at the time.  But even though I went through the Badlands, Searing Gorge, through Blackrock Mountain, and the Burning Steppes, and saw pretty cool things and whatnot, I can't specifically remember any of them the way I remember the sunset on the Karanas or spotting that Cyclops down by the river.  I sure as the hells was never actually scared.

Perhaps others' experiences are different, but with graveyards and everything else, it wasn't an epic journey, it was an annoying trip I had to take to activate my flight points.  So I think Engels is right and figuring out how to accomplish that now is not as simple as making a dangerous trip, but with all these modern safety-nets.  Because that ceases to be an epic journey that you remember ten years later, it becomes an annoyance that you had to go through.

I think you are probably right in the discovery aspect, however.  Part of what made my initial journey from Freeport to Qeynos so epic was that the extent of my knowledge of the route consisted of: Go West.  I figured as long as I kept heading west I'd get there eventually.  It probably wouldn't have been as fun, and I probably wouldn't remember parts of it in vivid detail today, if my first thought had been to check a website and get the exact route I should take, and dangers to avoid.  I would have known that it would be better to go through Highpass than through Rivervale, Runnyeye, and the Gorge of King Xorbb, all of which I only made it through because runnyeye was camped, and I ran into a human ranger at the gorge that helped me across.

[Ingmar]

 EVE does travel fine, I don't see why this couldn't be a model for Trek, aside from the obvious lore differences (warp drives v. jump gates for interstellar travel).   Most people that complain about EVE don't pick travel time as their reason for hating it, so I don't think we can use EVE marginal popular status as grounds for dismissing the idea.

Ummm, what? When I played EVE travel time was, bar none, the absolute single worst feature of the game. It was awful, worse by far than any other MMO I've ever played with regard to downtime spent staring at your ship going from point A to point B. I'm told they've made that less horrible now, but I don't know how much I believe it.

[Malakili]

 EVE does travel fine, I don't see why this couldn't be a model for Trek, aside from the obvious lore differences (warp drives v. jump gates for interstellar travel).   Most people that complain about EVE don't pick travel time as their reason for hating it, so I don't think we can use EVE marginal popular status as grounds for dismissing the idea.

Ummm, what? When I played EVE travel time was, bar none, the absolute single worst feature of the game. It was awful, worse by far than any other MMO I've ever played with regard to downtime spent staring at your ship going from point A to point B. I'm told they've made that less horrible now, but I don't know how much I believe it.

Maybe you played pre- warp to 0?  That cuts down quite a bit, especially for slow ships.   I've never found it to be bad though.  To me, running back and forth from one end to the other of duskwood 10 times to do all the quests was more frustrating than any of the travel times in EVE.

[HaemishM]

The problem is that at least in my experience, the removal of those things you term not fun makes the entire experience dull.  My first trip from Freeport to Qeynos was an epic journey that I still remember parts of in vivid detail. 

...

What I don't remember, was my first trip from Darnassus to Stormwind. 

Second MMOG syndrome. That second time will never be as magical as the first without additional sensory input, like smell or tactile input.

[Draegan]

The problem is that at least in my experience, the removal of those things you term not fun makes the entire experience dull.  My first trip from Freeport to Qeynos was an epic journey that I still remember parts of in vivid detail. 

...

What I don't remember, was my first trip from Darnassus to Stormwind. 

Second MMOG syndrome. That second time will never be as magical as the first without additional sensory input, like smell or tactile input.

a.k.a. Rosieglass syndrome.

I dealt with long travel times and pain the ass shit in SojournMUD back in the mid 90s.  I thought it was cool and gave me a sense of immersion and wonder.  I last 30 days in EQ because the game was a piece of shit in 1999.

[Malakili]

The problem is that at least in my experience, the removal of those things you term not fun makes the entire experience dull.  My first trip from Freeport to Qeynos was an epic journey that I still remember parts of in vivid detail. 

...

What I don't remember, was my first trip from Darnassus to Stormwind. 

Second MMOG syndrome. That second time will never be as magical as the first without additional sensory input, like smell or tactile input.

This is true to a degree.  I think trips can still be memorable though, and it isn't merely a result of having done things like that before.  Oddly enough, the fact that you only have to make the runs once per character in a game like WoW makes it that much worse in my opinion.   The entire "go through something annoying once and then you don't have to do it again" method is frustrating as hell and just seems put there to artificially piss you off.   Its like, just give me the flight points right off the bat, who cares.

 When travel time is long every time, it becomes part of the game.  In a game like EVE, or hell even Darkfall which I played for a bit, if you wanted to make long trips, you had to plan it out, make sure you were ready, possibly bring some people with you depending on the situation.    In other words, the traveling was/is PART of the game, rather than something you need to do in order to get to the part where you are playing the game.  Sure, some people may straight up not like it, and thats fine, but that isn't really my point.

[Engels]

Part of it is definately that the blush is off the rose. However, that said, plenty of single player games have been able to provide that epic scope while others of the same or later time period have failed. I'm thinking how well Fallout 3 gave me a sense of really being in a crushed Washington DC while ME2, despite its many many virtues, didn't make me feel the grandeur and majesty of space. Mind you, ME2 is a better game overall than Fallout 3, imho, but travel immersion in ME2 is muy broken.

[Sir T]

 EVE does travel fine, I don't see why this couldn't be a model for Trek, aside from the obvious lore differences (warp drives v. jump gates for interstellar travel).   Most people that complain about EVE don't pick travel time as their reason for hating it, so I don't think we can use EVE marginal popular status as grounds for dismissing the idea.

Ummm, what? When I played EVE travel time was, bar none, the absolute single worst feature of the game. It was awful, worse by far than any other MMO I've ever played with regard to downtime spent staring at your ship going from point A to point B. I'm told they've made that less horrible now, but I don't know how much I believe it.

Maybe you played pre- warp to 0?  That cuts down quite a bit, especially for slow ships.   I've never found it to be bad though.  To me, running back and forth from one end to the other of duskwood 10 times to do all the quests was more frustrating than any of the travel times in EVE.

Heh. I was going to post about the travel times. Frankly one of the reasons suicide ganking is so easy is that people typically go afk for long journeys, and simply leave Eve running in the background with the ship on autopilot. People would rather risk losing their shit than sit at the keyboard and play the fun of"right click on stargate" online. And I've been in lots of Fleets where people mass quit rather than fly 20 jumps. Travel in Eve is crap, so crap that people dont play the game while traveling, and people set up huge bridge chains to avoid doing it in 0.0.

And the interesting thing is that prior to warp to 0 CCP did everything possible to avoid bringing it in, including actions that borked their servers. The design they had included the godawful travel. The only reason people don't complain as loudly now is that it used to be far worse.

[GenVec]

The problem is that at least in my experience, the removal of those things you term not fun makes the entire experience dull.  My first trip from Freeport to Qeynos was an epic journey that I still remember parts of in vivid detail. 

...

What I don't remember, was my first trip from Darnassus to Stormwind. 

Second MMOG syndrome. That second time will never be as magical as the first without additional sensory input, like smell or tactile input.

I remember my first EQ trip just as vividly as Koyasha does. "Go west young man, the loot is good there." Epic beyond belief.
I then played Anarchy Online, and don't remember a damn thing about it.
I then played Eve, and have many a glorious story about space pew-pew and scams and drama and whatever.
Then I played WoW, and while I can vaguely recall that time we took down boss X, it doesn't really mean much.
Now I play on a NWN2 persistent world server with permadeath, and there's a new amazing incident once or twice a month.

It's not just the fact that it's our first MMO that's making us remember some of these games so fondly. There's something fundamentally different about the experiences being offered.

[Malakili]

It's not just the fact that it's our first MMO that's making us remember some of these games so fondly. There's something fundamentally different about the experiences being offered.

Agreed.  Incidentally, if its virtual worlds you're after, I think NWN persistent worlds are currently the very best option.

[Kageru]

Yes permadeath is great for making a memory, an enjoyable game-play session not so much.

[Viin]

Yes permadeath is great for making a memory, an enjoyable game-play session not so much.

I suppose that depends on why you play. If you can only vaguely recall what you did just a week ago, was it really worth spending 10hrs on that dungeon?