Will DDO survive the April attrition as free months expire?

[Nija]

what is it about DDO's dungeon-crawling that you guys don't find fun?

I had a good post here detailing what sucked in D&DO but it was deleted.

It doesn't really matter though. If you can't tell it sucks, hey, I'd love to be viewing this shit with whatever magical shades you have on. I'd suddenly have dozens of mmo games worth playing!

Yikes, lots of stuff in this game bugs me.

DEAR DIARY,

First, I think the higher ups at Turbine need to sit down and play some Guildwars and ask themselves if their game is really good enough to require a monthly fee, when Guildwars does not. This is assuming Turbine wants a monthly fee for this game, which I'm not sure of.

Second, seriously reconsider the 'right click to attack' that's present in the game. It just sparks a dice roll, and nothing is more saddening to see my dwarf dude swinging an axe right through a kobold model, and seeing that it missed. If you're going to make auto-attack optional, give it some blocks. It's not even a real massive multiplayer game in the first place, use that extra bandwidth available. If you're going to let me right click at any time to spark an attack, give me another hotkey to throw up a shield and block, if I have a shield available, or give me a parry hotkey so I can raise my weapon to try to block the incoming attack. Yeah, it's not D&D, but neither is being able to cast cure light wounds 13 times before having to rest.

Third, interface needs some work. Quest finished dialog always covers up the NPCs dialogue, specifically the "yeah, thanks, whatever" dialogue that the NPC tells you after you complete his quest. This text could say "Should we delete your character? Click here to confirm!" and I'd probably click it, since all I want is to end the text. I already got my PHAT LOOTS and EXP, why am I talking to you again?

Finally, the newbie experience. An hour played and I'm at 2400/10000 experience towards level 2. I have 3 spells I can use, and auto attack. I hope you really enjoy those 3 spells, you'll be using them quite a bit. Yeah, I have 13 available to me, but some are better than others. Nothing has grabbed me so far and made me want to advance further. The "you are in township area: 3" box in the top left is really disappointing. 

What is Dungeons & Dragons Online?
Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) is a fun, action-packed, massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that allows thousands of players to participate in a story-driven D&D campaign.

No, not REALLY. It allows thousands of people to share the same few dozen town instances with each other, and occasionaly wander through a doorway with 5 people and kill kobolds together. There might be more to it, I don't know, and I don't really care to find out!

Hopefully they are working on some grand newbie experience after they got systems sorted out in this beta, so I can really see what is ahead of me after, apparently, 5 more hours of doing stupid quests until I hit level 2.

[Hoax]

what is it about DDO's dungeon-crawling that you guys don't find fun?

I had a good post here detailing what sucked in D&DO but it was deleted.

It doesn't really matter though. If you can't tell it sucks, hey, I'd love to be viewing this shit with whatever magical shades you have on. I'd suddenly have dozens of mmo games worth playing!

dadowned!


Umm seriously, here's the thing about DDO and why it sucks.

1. The only good thing about it is that the combat reminds me of Diablo.  You know the game that made mindlessly clicking rapidly fun by having the best loot system ever?  OMG built-in voice chat?  Cool but not selling many copies on its own.  There is nothing else special about this game.  NOTHING.

Everything about DDO that sucks basically comes down to, "yeah but Diablo did it better".

DDO tries to not be Diablo by pretending to be an MMO, without any of the features that qualify a game as being a member of the club.  Unfortunately the result is it is a sub-par Diablo clone and a fake MMO, the only MMO "feature" they got right is charging me a monthly fee, yeah fuck you too Turbine.

Here are some reasons why I would rather be playing Diablo:
-The gui, I'd rather have b.net then a pretend "world" that basically amounts to some pointless running around minor timewaste and having inns I need to stand in to regen my hp & mp.  Yeah regen my hp & mp why the fuck do I need to do that again?  Back to basics, if all your combat takes place in instances there is dickall reason to make people regen hp/mp.  L2dev

-The loot, DDO's loot sucks, mostly because of its license, +1 just automatically sucks.  That is a bad system, I dont care that all fantasy MMO loot breaks down to +1 but fucking hide it or something.  Give me two extra shoulder pad spikes and call it Deathguard armor instead of Brigand armor.  Not complicated.  Or better yet, if the only reason to play the game is to get cool stuff, add more cool stuff.  The entire equipment system in DDO is uninspiring, there are too many little stupid icons and not enough OMG shiney!!! Moments.  Again, be more like Diablo if your going to clone Diablo.

-The dungeons themselves, yeah "handcrafted" w00p-de-fucking-doo.  I've watched at least 8 dungeons get crawled through, they all looked pretty fucking similar.  There must be variety hidden somewhere but I've seen 8 different "handcrafted" dungeons that look like the same goddamn sewer system.  Boring.  Oh and whoever told the dungeon crafters that more levers = more better, should be shot.  Levers are stupid, I dont need to fucking play with levers, esp when I can't solo any of this goddamn content.  What good is a puzzle aspect, or just a lever sequence aspect when I've got a bunch of random asshats waiting around, jumping and saying stupid shit I can't ignore because there is built-in voice chat?  Levers = bad when it only takes one person to hit a lever and there are several other people standing around waiting.  Btw, levers = even more badness if you require multiple people to hit a lever at the same time, or in a certain sequence, that is called a cockblock.  So basically, I'd rather play Diablo, the monsters are cooler, the dungeons (compared to the DDO stuff I've seen) are much cooler and the random factor means I get replay value and stuff.

-In closing DDO sucks, it will not see new year's day 2008, Hoax has spoken.


P.S.  Bored bored bored, I'd almost be happy to hear from some ghetto housing subsidy tenant in Oakland right about now.

[Numtini]

Good summary of the game actually.

[stray]

Truth

[Telemediocrity]

Wow... it's crazy, almost everything you hated about DDO was what I loved.  The more levers the better, for starters.  The click-to-swing combat system was one of the least integral parts of the whole thing to me.  I also really could give a shit less what the loot looks like, what my avatar looks like, what things are called, etc. Nor was the voice chat a big selling point to me. I also liked the HP & MP regen, as the taverns always had a nice 'communal hearth' feel to me, and provided some nice time to sit around and bullshit about the quest I just finished before the next one.  Also I kind of think it's cool that you have to engage the levers and trap deactivation strategically and prevent your team from being dumbasses, it's definitely a more fun form of 'cat herding' than the few 'raids' I've played in other MMOs.

Levers are actually a big one to me - AC1 had tons of lever and door puzzles, among other types, in its dungeons and it was always something I wanted to see a lot more of in MMOs.

[Nija]

In what world is 25 people sitting AFK outside one of the tavern doors communal?

Damn hippies.

[Telemediocrity]

It's more that we're all there, and the tavern music is playing (I really like the tavern music!) and it just has that nice feeling to it.  People are standing around, some people are dancing, others are hopping around... It doesn't really matter to me if they're AFK, my goal isn't really to interact with them anyways.

[pxib]

It's more that we're all there, and the tavern music is playing (I really like the tavern music!) and it just has that nice feeling to it.  People are standing around, some people are dancing, others are hopping around... It doesn't really matter to me if they're AFK, my goal isn't really to interact with them anyways.

Did that sound post-apocalyptic to anybody else?

It doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore. One last dance...

[stray]

It's more that we're all there, and the tavern music is playing (I really like the tavern music!) and it just has that nice feeling to it.  People are standing around, some people are dancing, others are hopping around... It doesn't really matter to me if they're AFK, my goal isn't really to interact with them anyways.

For a second there, I almost thought you were serious.

That applies to this entire thread btw.

[Nebu]

... and you guys call ME a hippie.

[Khaldun]

Wow... it's crazy, almost everything you hated about DDO was what I loved.  The more levers the better, for starters.  The click-to-swing combat system was one of the least integral parts of the whole thing to me.  I also really could give a shit less what the loot looks like, what my avatar looks like, what things are called, etc. Nor was the voice chat a big selling point to me. I also liked the HP & MP regen, as the taverns always had a nice 'communal hearth' feel to me, and provided some nice time to sit around and bullshit about the quest I just finished before the next one.  Also I kind of think it's cool that you have to engage the levers and trap deactivation strategically and prevent your team from being dumbasses, it's definitely a more fun form of 'cat herding' than the few 'raids' I've played in other MMOs.

Levers are actually a big one to me - AC1 had tons of lever and door puzzles, among other types, in its dungeons and it was always something I wanted to see a lot more of in MMOs.

Most fetishists know they have a fetish. This is what keeps a person who enjoys having people pee on them during sex from misperceiving that all sex everywhere for everyone ought to centrally involve being peed on.

So it's okay to say DDO suits your fetishistic needs. I have to say that a fetish for levers in dungeons strikes me as a tad more specific than "I like MMOs with strong PvP elements" or "I like MMOs that are friendly to Bartle-type exploration play". It strikes me as peculiarly lacking in self-awareness to assail others for their inability to share your fetish.

More importantly, it's just a mistake to misidentify how common or widespread your tastes may be. A lot of people in this thread are trying to get you to understand a basic empirical fact, that DDO is a boutique product and WoW is not. That they are non-equivalent in the way that their features sets and designs connect to possible audiences. Inasmuch as connecting to a bigger audience is likely to mean a much greater degree of economic success (in relation to the costs of production and maintenance of the MMO in question), this means WoW is a much more successful effort than DDO. It may even mean that DDO will not succeed at all, no matter how much you like it. These are not arguments about whose fetishes are best or most pleasurable: these are pretty straightforward analytic claims about the marketplace for MMOs and about the distribution of preferences among their possible audiences.

No MMO has been without its own fetishists, people who find that for whatever reason, there's a match between what they imagine they desire and what is delivered. On the AC2 forums, you could find plenty of people proudly declaring, six months in, that they were going to be playing AC2 until the mouse was pried from their cold, dead fingers. But anybody who could analytically read the wider marketplace, regardless of their own personal feelings about AC2, knew that those declarations of satisfaction meant nothing.

[HaemishM]

I agree that I'm surprised by the low mindshare that DDO is getting.  But beneath the questions of variety of content, amount of content, etcetera... what is it about DDO's dungeon-crawling that you guys don't find fun?

Combat felt slow and kludgy, and awkward as hell. Monster AI was buggy and inconsistent. Did I mention that combat was awkward. 

Have to rely on pickup groups to even get through first level.

Too many basements. Too much brown.

The UI stunk on ice, and was not worthy of being released.

EDIT: Also, the skill system. I'll put traps forward as an example. I'm walking along as a rogue(thief/whatever). Suddenly my sense danger goes off telling me there's a trap. Somewhere. Could be anywhere. The only indication of where I can disable this trap is that the control box glows. Sort of. No arrows giving me a general hint. Shit, I could stumble across the control box, but if I failed my sense danger roll, I can't disable the trap even though I see the control box. Why do I have this Sense Danger skill again? All it tells me is there is danger somewhere, with no real visual cues about what the danger is or how I avoid it. It feels half-assed. The simplest thing to do to help this skill would be to just throw up an arrow pointing in the general diretion of the box. It wouldn't be that much more fun, since clicking on the box and watching a progress bar doesn't feel like my thief is doing anything, but it would help. The optimal solution would be to make disabling the trap an actual puzzle game, similar to EQGems, or something from Puzzle Pirates, but that's hard.

In the end, the game feels half-assed.

[Khaldun]

Combat felt slow and kludgy, and awkward as hell. Monster AI was buggy and inconsistent. Did I mention that combat was awkward. 

Have to rely on pickup groups to even get through first level.

Too many basements. Too much brown.

The UI stunk on ice, and was not worthy of being released.

Pretty much what Haemish said.

But there's another thing. All MMOs are to some extent a forward investment of time, money and effort. If all that's waiting for me in a MMO is essentially a rental of content which is functionally indistinct from content-experiences I can get in games that don't charge me a rental, then there's only one remaining reason to pay that fee and make that investment, and that's the game promises a constant, reliable flow of additional content.

Other MMOGs like WoW, ATITD and even SWG, whatever their flaws or problems, provision some gameplay that almost cannot be found in non-MMO designs, a sense of "worldliness", or a way in which persistence matters. DDO is all about the content and experiencing it in a multiplayer format. There's nothing else there save perhaps various small fetishistic hooks like listening to tavern music and pulling lots of levers. No matter how satisfying the initial content is, if the designers cannot demonstrate that they have a reliable business plan for predictable infusions of content, then the investment of time and effort and most especially money isn't warranted.

In this respect, for all its many problems, Neverwinter Nights would be a better *system* for charging a subscription to play, because at least it had a model of how content might be delivered. Turbine doesn't convince me that they have any similar model for DDO, and that's fatal, because it's the only thing the game really brings to the MMO table that is potentially superior as a major feature in the market, given how much the basic importance of "persistence" is downgraded in DDO's design.

[Xilren's Twin]

Other MMOGs like WoW, ATITD and even SWG, whatever their flaws or problems, provision some gameplay that almost cannot be found in non-MMO designs, a sense of "worldliness", or a way in which persistence matters. DDO is all about the content and experiencing it in a multiplayer format. There's nothing else there save perhaps various small fetishistic hooks like listening to tavern music and pulling lots of levers. No matter how satisfying the initial content is, if the designers cannot demonstrate that they have a reliable business plan for predictable infusions of content, then the investment of time and effort and most especially money isn't warranted.

Way to break it down like an accountant.  The missing factor in your analysis is the oh so hard to quantify 'fun factor'.  Reason being, it's has long been known, and shown, that players will continue to pay for subscriptions to games where they have exhausted the dev created content, simply b/c they enjoy playing with their friends.  I.e. lets go raid Molten Core.... again.  If mmorpgs have shown anything, it's that people will happily pay to do the same tasks over and over and over, so long as there is enough subjective reasons for doing so (friends, phat loot, bragging rights, emotional feedback when they pwn someone, etc etc).  So it's really not the continuing stream of content which is the make of break you make it out to be.

As I spoke to my Beta writeup, DDO is most definately not for the average mmorpg player.  And in truth, I think it's highly probably Turbine knew that going in and set their own expectations for sucess accordingly.  At least I hope they did; it was pretty hard to miss the writing on the wall that DDO was never going to have the same mass market appeal as WoW or EQ BECAUSE of the way it was designed.  As usual, most of the cries of angst on the offical boards are from personal expectations not being met; whether that players expectations were valid or not can be an entirely different matter.

Xilren

[Telemediocrity]

But there's another thing. All MMOs are to some extent a forward investment of time, money and effort.

I completely disagree. Could you defend this?

For example:  There are any given number of things one could be doing right now, both within or without of computer games, to have fun.  Why on earth would someone do something un-fun now to have fun later if they can just have fun right now?

[d4rkj3di]

God help me, I'm going to bite.

Questing is central to MMOs, and it has the best questing system on the market.  Barely enough content to keep players interested for a week or two?  Read the fucking thread - it's got people who play 20 hours a week or something insanely catass like that since the Head Start period and have still only seen half the content.

Mediocre is one where you've got your opinion and I've got mine - but the myth that DDO has barely enough content for a week or two is just that - a myth.  Even the players on that thread who play more than any person humanly should seem to recognize that.  All you're doing is parroting the 'conventional wisdom' about DDO - conventional wisdom that, in this case, happens to be flat-out wrong.

It's quest system is shit.  It's worse than City of Heroes.  Any game that let's you repeat every fucking quest does so because there aren't enough quests to do without doing them more than once.  The people who play 20 hours a week haven't seen most of the content because they all run the same god damn quests over and over and over.  Waterworks and some other stupid one.  The myth that DDO has barely enough content for a week or two is *not* a myth when you can max a character in that time.  Surprise!  By running the same quests over and over.

How's all that content patched in doing?  Ya, the dragon got beat in less than 48 hours after the servers came back up.  Turbines answer to bored players tired of running the same quests repeatedly was to turn the game into AC3 and drop in quest timers.  Can't do that quest again for 66 hours?  Hmm, what's this door I've never decided to open before?

Forcing your players into uninteresting content is bullshit, you should make the content interesting enough to get them to try it without marching them to it.  Here's my conventional wisdom about DDO:  It's a fun game for about 25,000 people, and that's all it will ever appeal to.  I am not one of those people.

[Telemediocrity]

The myth that DDO has barely enough content for a week or two is *not* a myth when you can max a character in that time.  Surprise!  By running the same quests over and over.

If the players got to level 10 by running the same quests over and over, they fucked up.  Why should the game be modified to keep them from fucking up?  I don't play MMOs to be someone else's daddy.

How's all that content patched in doing?  Ya, the dragon got beat in less than 48 hours after the servers came back up.

Well, duh.  You've never played a Turbine game, have you?  They've always felt that it was a bullshit mechanic to have a boss that's so tough to defeat that he stands up for weeks or months before someone finally defeats him.  They don't see the fun in that, and neither do I.  The one content piece they ever put ingame that took more than a month to solve (Aerlinthe in AC1) was due to them adding new puzzle mechanics to the game that players couldn't figure out in a month (but made perfect sense once we finally got it), not because there was an uber-mob that we all knew about but was too tough to kill.

[sigil]

Stop using turbine as a gold standard, and you might understand.

The harbinger quest shoots your theory down, and  there were multiple quests that took more than a month to figure out. Asheron's island, some of the stuff from Marae Lassel.

Also remember that AC  was the choice of the exploiter. They didn't do anything to punish that behavior until very very late in the game. It's easy to figure out the quest when you can map the whole thing out by deconstructing the client. and running software on top of the system to bypass  much of the operational design of the game.

You are fooling yourself that turbine has done anything worth mentioning as the way something  "should be done"


I used to think like you, I know better now.

[Yegolev]

It's more that we're all there, and the tavern music is playing (I really like the tavern music!) and it just has that nice feeling to it.  People are standing around, some people are dancing, others are hopping around... It doesn't really matter to me if they're AFK, my goal isn't really to interact with them anyways.

This makes no sense to me.  Sounds like you'd be happy with people in an animated GIF background, like the casino stage in Street Fighter II Turbo.

[Khaldun]

Other MMOGs like WoW, ATITD and even SWG, whatever their flaws or problems, provision some gameplay that almost cannot be found in non-MMO designs, a sense of "worldliness", or a way in which persistence matters. DDO is all about the content and experiencing it in a multiplayer format. There's nothing else there save perhaps various small fetishistic hooks like listening to tavern music and pulling lots of levers. No matter how satisfying the initial content is, if the designers cannot demonstrate that they have a reliable business plan for predictable infusions of content, then the investment of time and effort and most especially money isn't warranted.

Way to break it down like an accountant.  The missing factor in your analysis is the oh so hard to quantify 'fun factor'.  Reason being, it's has long been known, and shown, that players will continue to pay for subscriptions to games where they have exhausted the dev created content, simply b/c they enjoy playing with their friends.  I.e. lets go raid Molten Core.... again.  If mmorpgs have shown anything, it's that people will happily pay to do the same tasks over and over and over, so long as there is enough subjective reasons for doing so (friends, phat loot, bragging rights, emotional feedback when they pwn someone, etc etc).  So it's really not the continuing stream of content which is the make of break you make it out to be.

It isn't the continuing stream of content that makes or breaks a game that makes worldliness and persistence an important part of its design.

But a MMO that is based around nothing more than multiplayer experience of content, where there is no world and where persistence barely matters, content is all that counts. If you don't have a model for pushing content out on a reliable basis, there's no reason to subscribe. As David Gelertner has put it, tangible issues outweigh intangibles every time. The "fun factor" is, I agree, a hard-to-quantify thing in any MMO, and it explains a lot of the "stickiness" that keeps people subscribing. But also worldliness and persistence is a big part of that stickiness. If what you have instead is just a subscription model for consuming content with other people, you don't have anything that many basically free games provide. Unless you've got a schedule for pushing content constantly.

As I spoke to my Beta writeup, DDO is most definately not for the average mmorpg player.  And in truth, I think it's highly probably Turbine knew that going in and set their own expectations for sucess accordingly.  At least I hope they did; it was pretty hard to miss the writing on the wall that DDO was never going to have the same mass market appeal as WoW or EQ BECAUSE of the way it was designed.  As usual, most of the cries of angst on the offical boards are from personal expectations not being met; whether that players expectations were valid or not can be an entirely different matter.

Xilren

Cool. It's not for the average MMOG player. Then it had better hit its niche and hit it hard, and that niche had better be bigger by a good margin than the costs of running the game are. Otherwise, it really doesn't mean a damn thing to say "it's not for the average MMOG player" as an assessment of the game. A development house could design a MMOG where you got to bake ten different kinds of bread all day, which is not for the average MMOG player, but which might actually be just what a few people out there would actually pay to play. It really doesn't say anything worth saying to say that it doesn't meet the needs of a larger market unless we have some sense of whether the market it does hit is of sufficient size to make the venture pay off. Moreover, it might well be possible that the basic conceptual design of the game is in some respects a misfire even in its own terms--hence, my thought that a game built around experiencing content rather than inhabiting a persistent world is in bad trouble if it doesn't have a content-provision model.

[Khaldun]

But there's another thing. All MMOs are to some extent a forward investment of time, money and effort.

I completely disagree. Could you defend this?

For example:  There are any given number of things one could be doing right now, both within or without of computer games, to have fun.  Why on earth would someone do something un-fun now to have fun later if they can just have fun right now?

Because the main thing that distinguishes an MMO from a multiplayer FPS (say, Unreal Tournament) is persistence. E.g., that something about any given game session is recorded and persists to the next game session, that the game at N and N + 1 are fundamentally different experiences.

If you don't understand that about MMOs, seriously, you don't understand anything about them. It is their defining attribute. You can certainly question how most MMOs on the market approach that property. I think most of them make the big mistake of investing persistence in the avatar rather than in the world, so that the main thing that changes accumulatively is a given character's level, power, wealth, and so on, rather than the world changing in response to player actions. But in either case, persistence is the defining attribute--and therefore to play an MMO is necessarily to invest in a conception of what's going to happen over time, what the accumulative effects of your play will be.

[Mesozoic]

The myth that DDO has barely enough content for a week or two is *not* a myth when you can max a character in that time.  Surprise!  By running the same quests over and over.

If the players got to level 10 by running the same quests over and over, they fucked up.  Why should the game be modified to keep them from fucking up?  I don't play MMOs to be someone else's daddy.
 

Who was it that decided that good play should be rewarded by experience points and money, which translates to levels and gear?  Which in turn results in levels and gear which represent status and success? 

Answer:  Turbine.  And so thats what the players go for, in this case by repeating a few quests ad nauseum.  You're blaming the players for simply trying to excel at the game that was provided to them.  The old "you're not playing it right!" gimmick, which is stupid.

[Telemediocrity]

Stop using turbine as a gold standard, and you might understand.

On this, we'll agree to disagree.  AC2 aside, I think Turbine is the gold standard for how to get things in MMOs really, really right.  Granted, it's often by accident and any given game doesn't have everything 'right' in it, but I can't really think of any area of MMOs where another company has done it better than Turbine at some point in time.

The harbinger quest shoots your theory down, and  there were multiple quests that took more than a month to figure out. Asheron's island, some of the stuff from Marae Lassel.

The Harbinger Quest did not take months to complete - it was set to only spawn once every few months, but when it spawned it was beaten on basically the first try.  Asheron's Island was a similar example; there were no super-difficult-bosses that took a long time, everything was beaten on pretty much the first try.  Marae Lassel?  The Queen was killed within 24 hours of the servers coming up.

Also, keep in mind that the examples you name, as bad as they are, involved players trying to figure out how to solve quests, not trying 100 times to kill the big bad foozle at the end.  Nonetheless, this thread really isn't about AC.

Also remember that AC  was the choice of the exploiter. They didn't do anything to punish that behavior until very very late in the game. It's easy to figure out the quest when you can map the whole thing out by deconstructing the client. and running software on top of the system to bypass  much of the operational design of the game.

Third party apps were overall an improvement to the game - more companies should lean more toward Turbine's policy than the silly prohibitiveness of EQ or DAoC. It adds a nice metagame layer to the action, and it drove the people who cry about everything being "unfair" out of the game, which was nice to not have to listen to. But again, this thread isn't really about AC.

[Morfiend]

On this, we'll agree to disagree.  AC2 aside, I think Turbine is the gold standard for how to get things in MMOs really, really right.  Granted, it's often by accident and any given game doesn't have everything 'right' in it, but I can't really think of any area of MMOs where another company has done it better than Turbine at some point in time.

So far the only thing they have got right was AC1, and I think that was an accedent.

[sigil]

You're right. That's a shock right there. This thread isn't about AC, it's about how Turbine consistently takes the wrong approach in making these game. It's also  three pages too long.

However, AC is the only game Turbine has made that hasn't been closed or look like a strong candidate for closing in the forseeable future. DDO is not going to succeed, due to drab art, forced grouping, bad combat, and shallow immersion. Given as such, I think it's fair to use it to disprove points you make about  how turbine  handles MMOs so well.

However, you can continue to believe your little lollipop munchkin land, where Turbine is the greatest thing ever, where magic dancing drudges dance with kobolds in a sepia toned field while exploiters hand out candy.

[Telemediocrity]

But there's another thing. All MMOs are to some extent a forward investment of time, money and effort.

I completely disagree. Could you defend this?

For example:  There are any given number of things one could be doing right now, both within or without of computer games, to have fun.  Why on earth would someone do something un-fun now to have fun later if they can just have fun right now?

Because the main thing that distinguishes an MMO from a multiplayer FPS (say, Unreal Tournament) is persistence. E.g., that something about any given game session is recorded and persists to the next game session, that the game at N and N + 1 are fundamentally different experiences.

I don't see persistence as being the big selling point of MMOs.  Also, plenty of multiplayer FPS'es have worked in persistence: For instance, the Warcraft 3 mod for CounterStrike, which if anything often builds a better 'community' around it than most MMOs do.

Persistence is just a means to an end, which is fun.  There's no reason a MMO has to be persistent; that's just how most of the first MMOs started out, and so it's stuck. (Alternate explanation: Persistence is a great way to hook people with addictive personalities and obsessive-compulsive behaviors who love to watch their stats/loot stats/gold count/whatever rise, which is a good way of ensuring a stable revenue stream)

There's nothing that makes persistence 'special' or the defining attribute of MMOs.  You're just tossing that out there arbitrarily for no good reason.

[Rasix]

You can stop with the blatant trolling anytime now.  That goes for any one of the 5+ threads you're currently fagging up.

Forum griefplay gets annoying.

[HaemishM]

I don't see persistence as being the big selling point of MMOs. 

No, it's community that is the big selling point. But since you don't believe that exists either, I guess there is no selling point.

Persistence IS a big selling point of MMOG's, right along with community. Planetside's main selling point was that it was an FPS, only with persistent charcters with stats and places to capture all around the world. IMO, that was a flawed idea, but hey, it was still the selling point.

[Zane0]

I don't see persistence as being the big selling point of MMOs.

Considering that an MMO has to be persistant to be an "MMO" as people understand the term, I don't think it would be possible for me to disagree more.

[Telemediocrity]

I don't see persistence as being the big selling point of MMOs.

Considering that an MMO has to be persistant to be an "MMO" as people understand the term, I don't think it would be possible for me to disagree more.

I've always considered the debates over what "is" or "isn't" a MMO (i.e. with Guild Wars, DDO, or Diablo) to be utterly pointless - there's no reason to hold a hard and fast definition of what does and doesn't qualify as a MMO, it's not like doing so makes the game itself any more or less fun.

You can stop with the blatant trolling anytime now.  That goes for any one of the 5+ threads you're currently fagging up

It's not trolling - it's just that we disagree on fundamental premises.  When there's disagreement on fundamental premises, that's where you have to go to iron things out.  For instance, if two people are debating abortion, to really make headway they have to move to debating life's purpose, when life begins, what are and aren't human rights, etcetera.

When debating whether a MMO is good, if we hold fundamentally different conceptions of what makes a "good" MMO, then that's where we have to go to make headway.

No, it's community that is the big selling point. But since you don't believe that exists either, I guess there is no selling point.

Why can't fun be the big selling point?  "Hey, this game is really fun!  It's fun enough that you'd be willing to pay more for it than some one-time-purchase single player game that isn't as fun!"  Where that fun comes from is incidental.  I don't think it'd be entirely unreasonable to pay monthly access charges for a purely single-player game, if the game was so orgasmically fun that it were worth it.

Come to think of that, many do!  The game is called "masturbation", and plenty of people pay between ten and thirty dollars a month for the game despite its negligible level of interpersonal interaction because it's just That Damn Fun.  (The more I think about it, the more apt that analogy is)

Who was it that decided that good play should be rewarded by experience points and money, which translates to levels and gear?  Which in turn results in levels and gear which represent status and success? 

Since when do levels and gear represent status and success in a MMO?  Not in any that I've played for very long.  Since when is experience points and money what the players are after when they play?  I don't see why a player would log in and go "I want to get as much XP and money as possible", regardless of whether that's what'll lead them to fun or not.

XP and ingame cash does not equal incentivization. Not at all.  All it equals is access: A lack of XP and money can serve as a cockblock to keep you from doing something fun, if that's how the devs design the game.  But since Turbine devs didn't design a lack of XP as a cockblock to missing out on the 'fun stuff' in DDO, why pursue XP at all?  (First answer that pops to mind: People are broken)

[Venkman]

For example: There are any given number of things one could be doing right now, both within or without of computer games, to have fun. Why on earth would someone do something un-fun now to have fun later if they can just have fun right now?

The best games are both fun right now and foreward investments. Otherwise nobody would ever get past the first level of anything. This allows the individual player to choose for themselves which part of they think of as most fun. Some only Raid, thinking of all other levels as simply something to be endured. Other people don't see any difference between Raiding and general adventuring except in the larger number of people and the much less frequency of rewards.

Why can't fun be the big selling point?

The point is that it can't be the only one. These games cost too much time and money to make. All games do. Some may want to not talk about the business side of things, but the people making these games live that every day. How do they get 10mil, 20mil, 80mil to develop games? By convincing money holders they've got a plan and a proven track record to deliver it. That's all business there.

Business factors keep games live or not. But ultimately, those are a result on how well a company identified their target audience, identified their needs, fulfilled them and scaled their business revenue needs appropriately. It's why a game like Eve can be seen as growing when a game like SWG, with twice as many subscribers, had to be gutted and redesigned.

The reason we don't talk about just the "fun" anymore is because there's so much more to discuss than whether Feature X in Game Y is good. Why features show up in games is also linked to business. I continually wish CoH was more successful for example because it contains some great ideas I feel will be forgotten when it's so "obvious" (to business folks) everyone just wants another item-based diku.

[Lantyssa]

Wow.  Tele, you really don't understand people's motivations at all.  Take the opposite of everything you just said and you describe the LCD which drives most of these games.  The best most of us can hope for is that it is dressed up in fun systems so those of us not completely motivated by these things have some reason to play, too.

[Jobu]

Come to think of that, many do!  The game is called "masturbation", and plenty of people pay between ten and thirty dollars a month for the game despite its negligible level of interpersonal interaction because it's just That Damn Fun.  (The more I think about it, the more apt that analogy is)

Wait wait wait. You pay yourself 30 bucks a month to spank it?

This thread is great. It's like an intervention where you want to un-program a friend who's spent far too much time with the crazy cult down the street.

[Telemediocrity]

The best most of us can hope for is that it is dressed up in fun systems so those of us not completely motivated by these things have some reason to play, too.

Why set your expectations that low?

[Telemediocrity]

Come to think of that, many do!  The game is called "masturbation", and plenty of people pay between ten and thirty dollars a month for the game despite its negligible level of interpersonal interaction because it's just That Damn Fun.  (The more I think about it, the more apt that analogy is)

Wait wait wait. You pay yourself 30 bucks a month to spank it?

This thread is great. It's like an intervention where you want to un-program a friend who's spent far too much time with the crazy cult down the street.

Not paying yourself.  Paying for access to a monthly service.  Such as (NSFW) Videobox.com, reasonably priced at 10 a month, 15 a month if you want to download DVD Quality.  But please, you get the point of the analogy - let's not derail the thread here.