Lord help me, I am glad you are not a games designer.
I was typing up a long response to you because I am baffled by the idea that you would want an MMORPG that doesn't encourage people to play the game with each other. Assuming the people that up-voted your comment though didn't like mine, I expect that I would be down voted anyways.
I'll suffice it to say that I would be very upset if the world consisted of MMORPG's that were glorified chat lobbies like SWTOR.
No one here has claimed that they are a pro-gamer and you SURELY do not need to be a pro-gamer to succeed as an adequate member of a group in SWTOR or WoW or any other recent MMORPG. If such barriers existed, then I would completely agree with you, but that kind of hyperbole is toxic.
Creating solo content isn't the problem here. Everyone wants to be able to adventure on their own and explore the world sometimes. Single player RPG's like the Elder Scrolls series prove this ten fold. We all want single player content in our games. The question is whether we need to have a lot of solo content to progress through the game in any kind of traditional sense.
We have always had people using solo content to learn the ropes of their character and how to use your abilities. That is great! I think that should continue. It's not continuing however because the way you use your abilities in solo content in something like World of Warcraft or SWTOR is not the same way you are going to use it in group/raid content. That's what leads people to get frustrated and angry at newer players when they enter a group. The other players in that group are sitting there with an assumption that their other compatriots are going to be able to fill the key roles they signed up for whether it be the tank, dps or heals.
Unfortunately, the reality is quite a shock when the players find out that one person doesn't know heads or tails of how to use their abilities in a group environment. It is also quite a shock for that player because they thought they were doing just fine the whole time leveling up, because they were progressing at a good pace right? They couldn't have been doing something wrong! This situation happens every single day in MMORPG's and it could be prevented if the solo content was created better and players were thrust into group content earlier on as they were leveling up and learning their abilities instead of being blindsided when they reach cap.
Also, the internet is an unforgiving place. In the previous scenario, the other players probably votekicked and raged at the player because they don't know how to control their emotions via the internet. The player probably was resistant to being told they were wrong and doesn't comprehend why the others were upset in the first place and may just sit down and think that maybe they should have been better prepared and that those other people are playing the game "too seriously". It's a tale as old as time, we need to foster being helpful to each other in the group setting. I'm not going to be able to change it and you're not. The only people that have the ability to help the situation right now are developers where they can create content that helps players know their role and place BEFORE they are introduced to group content.
@krakead Hey now, let's not downvote the guy for his opinion. I'm specifically replying to you Krakead, but I'm referring to anyone that did seeing as how his message has been downvoted to grey status.
Not sure why I'm bothering saying that though. Mob mentality reigns supreme on the internet :P
I think there's something to be said for encouraging grouping over solo play in a game genre that was built with the idea behind it that you were meant to work along side your friends. Yeah, you can say I'm just spinning "It's an MMORPG, you need to group!" but that was the intent of class design in the first place.
I'm not referring to games like SWTOR here that have an obvious niche at being a single-player game where they pretend to be an MMORPG for recognition. When MMORPG's were designed off of being an extension of what people liked about playing pen and paper RPG's with their friends, and in that class composition design, every class brought something different to the table to bring the group together. And clearly, by our powers combined, we could summon Captain Planet and save the day or slay the dragon or whatever. I'd laugh at the gaming table you went to playing Dungeons and Dragons and you suddenly requested to go on a task by yourself, leaving the rest of your compatriots behind. Sounds like a quick way to get Mountain Dew down your shorts.
This all being said, I will invoke the classic "Games aren't being made like they used to" and they are not. It's the truth of the matter whether for good or bad. We still have some of the similar looks of group designed games like classes and such, but really the games have gone so far off the beaten path that I'd really rather they don't even be called MMORPG's anymore. Can we just get a new moniker already so that we can have a different genre at the PC gaming aisle? Maybe then we can get developers to start making MMORPG's again.
How about Single Player Lobby Online Omnipresent Generated Experiences or SPLOOGE for short. This really shouldn't even be a debate. Do you think someone playing other multi-player games sit down and debate with their communities whether it'd be more fun to play the game by yourself? Can you imagine someone playing Call of Duty or League of Legends going "Man, if only I could do this solo!".
Without ranting further, for the love of all that is holy, do not play the rose-tinted glasses card on me. The seemingly time-impervious defense to coming up with a real argument by somehow attempting to question whether I can remember what I like or not in a game. It's absurd.
I am sure hoping Valdur. I'm very much looking forward to GW2 and hell I'm even giving some looks at ArcheAge as well. I'm not completely sold on The Secret World yet, but there's always time!
I'm also keeping a keen eye out to see what Sony does with EQNext. Those are really the top of my plate right now.
This is spot on sir. I especially like your comment about today's MMO designers being so risk averse. (Which is something I actually mentioned on my show, I'm Adventure Mike btw, watch me on the livestream sometime! *plugplugplug*) When games being churned out are worth multi-millions of dollars, they have no alternative then to attempt to take a chunk out of Blizzard's MMO pie to sustain themselves.
EQ peaked at what? ~500,000-1,000,000 users at it's height? 500,000 is what BioWare has claimed it needs just to SUSTAIN it's game. This is more doable in the current market that has players Blizzard brought into the fold, but still, every time I think about those numbers, I balk. Did their investors grill the team to guarantee they have to make that quota or else the game fails? I really would like the know. Thank goodness they have their library of RPG's and previous fanbase, in addition to the Star Wars brand itself to supplement, is all I can say.
Games like EQ where they tried out new ideas and fantastic new world types (Planes of existence? Yes please!) that had the possibility of being incredibly popular or a flop doesn't stand a chance anymore. They can't afford it. The greater MMO-player base today doesn't allow such chances without dropping the game, so I don't completely blame the companies. On the other hand, I'm sure there must be a way to make a complete, relatively un-buggy game without dropping half a billion dollars doing it.
I am in the same boat as you guys though. I feel like endgame is an artificial wall at the moment due to the fact that at some point I am going to run out of things to do. Granted this will probably happen in most MMO's, I will reference Nexus like I did in my original post and the hunting for stats we did. You didn't have a cap on how much you could progress, it just took increasingly more and more gobs of experience to do it. For that matter, like you brought up, to even get to max level took a lot longer as well.
As I've talked with friends about SWTOR, I'm not campaigning to return to the days it took a literal year to reach max level (not that I'd complain), but we DO need to get back to a good medium. The fact that people were getting level 50 in SWTOR before the early start was even complete is borderline offensive.
I was reviewing posts I made a year or two ago on this site about the very same things that I am now. There is room in the market for MMO's that appeal to people like myself, you, Beau, etc. but the company creating them HAS to realize that they are not going to get remotely close to WoW's numbers and be able to be happy with that. That is the reality of the situation and I'm sure there are developers out there that will be able work under these conditions and for our demographic. The pendulum will swing back our way someday. We just have to wait it out.
Back when I first started playing MMO's with things like Nexus:TK and EQ, I never really played the numbers game or paid super attention to how efficient I was being with my time.
Some of my best memories from things like Nexus were the player controlled sub-paths (subsets of classes that were player governed) putting on events that I could participate in. We didn't have an "endgame". You logged on, you played, had a good time and then logged off. You could go progress your character to make him stronger but you didn't have to, so we made our own fun on the side with role-play events and such. To progress a character you could go "hunting" with friends which was just making groups to go plunder mobs for hours while gaining rare items and XP which could advance you in level, or when you hit cap at 99, be used as currency to buy stats for your character.
With EQ I never did quite as much role-playing events as I had in the previous games but I still didn't feel the need to plow my way to the end where "the real game" was waiting for me. I spent my time progressing in levels and picking up experience at the time as to how to effectively play my class in a group (paladin). I still remember fighting crystal spiders in ice caverns to this day because I remember how cool that place looked. I would play for hours just to gain one level a day or every few days but still had a great time just hanging out with people while progressing my character.
Unfortunately, the game-play I just mentioned falls into the category of "grinding" by today's standards. In fact, I see your reference to RuneScape being "grindy" as something that I (and you as well) saw in one of the other articles today where there was a large amount of complaining about grinding in the game and how there was nothing else to do. Don't get me wrong, the term "grinding" was used back then as well but when you didn't want to grind for awhile, you just went and did something else instead.
When I started playing WoW in 2004, I approached it much I had previous MMO's, only this time I had more friends joining me as they decided the barrier of entry was more reasonable (death penalties and such). When arriving at the maxed level, I remember doing many dungeons to get gear and then eventually they released the first raid. Everything felt pretty solid and flowed well in terms of time management it took to get to 60 and get geared and then progress into raiding. There was still grind at times though, but the burden was eased on us.
As the community for WoW grew, the average player was able to aggregate more and more information for themselves to the point that Min/Maxing with parsers from previous games wasn't an aspect of certain players, it became the standard by which we were to play the game by. It started okay for us to play like that, but eventually we started out playing Blizzard's hardest encounters to the point that they had to make them artificially impossible to beat until they deemed us ready to. There was backlash at the time to this design, so they conceded to us by making bosses that were killable but required not even a single person out of 40 to make a single mistake lest we be overcome by a mechanic.
I'm not going to go over the entirety of WoW's history and why it has changed the MMO-scape how we know it. Suffice to say that players of today won't accept things that we took as standard in the past. Going out and hunting creatures for the sport of it is "grinding" and is considered an unacceptable game design. Not allowing us to manipulate every aspect of how our game looks in our client/browser window is being deemed unacceptable. Hell, even being asked to go find a place out in the world before teleporting to it seems to be too much to ask. Playing the numbers game with addons is the "correct" way to play the game now and if you do not, you tend to be shunned. I can't count the number of times I've almost been kicked out of WoW guilds for refusing to use boss mods until I proved I could achieve the mechanics without needing them.
Making everyone feel like they have to game like a pro-gamer to play the game right has hurt the games we love. The average gamer cannot play like that and does not want to. This is why level 50 as a cap in SWTOR was not enough. This is why the concept of needing to get to endgame is a lousy design philosophy. This is why design of our MMOs needs to change again. Games are being built around the "rush to the end first" crowd and they're not giving us content in the middle to care about.
What you guys are describing here is very much how FF14 attempted to do it with the market wards. Not the first iteration, mind you, but the subsequent ones which by then had become diluted. The unfortunate part is that the majority of the people who were playing FF14 the last time I played, were screaming "Just put in an auction house", "Just put in an auction house!".
Players can't be bothered to add any extra travel time to their purchasing trips, so they demonized the systems that were attempted to put in place there. FF14 literally would let you search for an item, when you found it, send you to the wards and mark on your map who was selling it so you could go straight to the correct vender and purchase it. The vocal players did not care for any feelings of immersion and chided the idea of taking what they believed to be unnecessarily longer to get their item in the end.
Games aren't allowed to feel realistic after all :P With the advent of more and more realistic looking graphics, other systems like instant travel, ebay-esque auction houses and other such conveniences make our games feel less so. I don't wish to get in an argument about whether it's "magic" or not though XD Yes, you can explain it away. Merely making a point about instant gratification rather than having the small things in life.
The Daily Grind: How much grouping should be required in a game?
Mar 11th 2012 6:36PM (Massively)I'm sorry, but Guild Wars 2 isn't going to really change much of anything. Everyone is building it up to be something it is not.
The Daily Grind: How much grouping should be required in a game?
Mar 11th 2012 6:35PM (Massively)Lord help me, I am glad you are not a games designer.
I was typing up a long response to you because I am baffled by the idea that you would want an MMORPG that doesn't encourage people to play the game with each other. Assuming the people that up-voted your comment though didn't like mine, I expect that I would be down voted anyways.
I'll suffice it to say that I would be very upset if the world consisted of MMORPG's that were glorified chat lobbies like SWTOR.
The Daily Grind: How much grouping should be required in a game?
Mar 11th 2012 12:12PM (Massively)No one here has claimed that they are a pro-gamer and you SURELY do not need to be a pro-gamer to succeed as an adequate member of a group in SWTOR or WoW or any other recent MMORPG. If such barriers existed, then I would completely agree with you, but that kind of hyperbole is toxic.
Creating solo content isn't the problem here. Everyone wants to be able to adventure on their own and explore the world sometimes. Single player RPG's like the Elder Scrolls series prove this ten fold. We all want single player content in our games. The question is whether we need to have a lot of solo content to progress through the game in any kind of traditional sense.
We have always had people using solo content to learn the ropes of their character and how to use your abilities. That is great! I think that should continue. It's not continuing however because the way you use your abilities in solo content in something like World of Warcraft or SWTOR is not the same way you are going to use it in group/raid content. That's what leads people to get frustrated and angry at newer players when they enter a group. The other players in that group are sitting there with an assumption that their other compatriots are going to be able to fill the key roles they signed up for whether it be the tank, dps or heals.
Unfortunately, the reality is quite a shock when the players find out that one person doesn't know heads or tails of how to use their abilities in a group environment. It is also quite a shock for that player because they thought they were doing just fine the whole time leveling up, because they were progressing at a good pace right? They couldn't have been doing something wrong! This situation happens every single day in MMORPG's and it could be prevented if the solo content was created better and players were thrust into group content earlier on as they were leveling up and learning their abilities instead of being blindsided when they reach cap.
Also, the internet is an unforgiving place. In the previous scenario, the other players probably votekicked and raged at the player because they don't know how to control their emotions via the internet. The player probably was resistant to being told they were wrong and doesn't comprehend why the others were upset in the first place and may just sit down and think that maybe they should have been better prepared and that those other people are playing the game "too seriously". It's a tale as old as time, we need to foster being helpful to each other in the group setting. I'm not going to be able to change it and you're not. The only people that have the ability to help the situation right now are developers where they can create content that helps players know their role and place BEFORE they are introduced to group content.
The Daily Grind: How much grouping should be required in a game?
Mar 11th 2012 11:22AM (Massively)Not sure why I'm bothering saying that though. Mob mentality reigns supreme on the internet :P
I think there's something to be said for encouraging grouping over solo play in a game genre that was built with the idea behind it that you were meant to work along side your friends. Yeah, you can say I'm just spinning "It's an MMORPG, you need to group!" but that was the intent of class design in the first place.
I'm not referring to games like SWTOR here that have an obvious niche at being a single-player game where they pretend to be an MMORPG for recognition. When MMORPG's were designed off of being an extension of what people liked about playing pen and paper RPG's with their friends, and in that class composition design, every class brought something different to the table to bring the group together. And clearly, by our powers combined, we could summon Captain Planet and save the day or slay the dragon or whatever. I'd laugh at the gaming table you went to playing Dungeons and Dragons and you suddenly requested to go on a task by yourself, leaving the rest of your compatriots behind. Sounds like a quick way to get Mountain Dew down your shorts.
This all being said, I will invoke the classic "Games aren't being made like they used to" and they are not. It's the truth of the matter whether for good or bad. We still have some of the similar looks of group designed games like classes and such, but really the games have gone so far off the beaten path that I'd really rather they don't even be called MMORPG's anymore. Can we just get a new moniker already so that we can have a different genre at the PC gaming aisle? Maybe then we can get developers to start making MMORPG's again.
How about Single Player Lobby Online Omnipresent Generated Experiences or SPLOOGE for short. This really shouldn't even be a debate. Do you think someone playing other multi-player games sit down and debate with their communities whether it'd be more fun to play the game by yourself? Can you imagine someone playing Call of Duty or League of Legends going "Man, if only I could do this solo!".
Without ranting further, for the love of all that is holy, do not play the rose-tinted glasses card on me. The seemingly time-impervious defense to coming up with a real argument by somehow attempting to question whether I can remember what I like or not in a game. It's absurd.
Diablo III will see you in hell... mode
Feb 10th 2012 9:35PM (Massively)I'm curious. What exactly are today's "Standards" that dictate that we can't have point and click action RPG's?
That sentence that somehow in the year 2012, we are beyond having an entire genre of games is idiocy.
Diablo III will see you in hell... mode
Feb 10th 2012 8:44PM (Massively)Cause genres of games that people enjoyed in the past are no longer able to be enjoyed because we hit 2012?
That's ludicrous.
Free for All: Looking for experiences, not challenges
Jan 25th 2012 11:14PM (Massively)I am sure hoping Valdur. I'm very much looking forward to GW2 and hell I'm even giving some looks at ArcheAge as well. I'm not completely sold on The Secret World yet, but there's always time!
I'm also keeping a keen eye out to see what Sony does with EQNext. Those are really the top of my plate right now.
Free for All: Looking for experiences, not challenges
Jan 25th 2012 9:52PM (Massively)This is spot on sir. I especially like your comment about today's MMO designers being so risk averse. (Which is something I actually mentioned on my show, I'm Adventure Mike btw, watch me on the livestream sometime! *plugplugplug*) When games being churned out are worth multi-millions of dollars, they have no alternative then to attempt to take a chunk out of Blizzard's MMO pie to sustain themselves.
EQ peaked at what? ~500,000-1,000,000 users at it's height? 500,000 is what BioWare has claimed it needs just to SUSTAIN it's game. This is more doable in the current market that has players Blizzard brought into the fold, but still, every time I think about those numbers, I balk. Did their investors grill the team to guarantee they have to make that quota or else the game fails? I really would like the know. Thank goodness they have their library of RPG's and previous fanbase, in addition to the Star Wars brand itself to supplement, is all I can say.
Games like EQ where they tried out new ideas and fantastic new world types (Planes of existence? Yes please!) that had the possibility of being incredibly popular or a flop doesn't stand a chance anymore. They can't afford it. The greater MMO-player base today doesn't allow such chances without dropping the game, so I don't completely blame the companies. On the other hand, I'm sure there must be a way to make a complete, relatively un-buggy game without dropping half a billion dollars doing it.
I am in the same boat as you guys though. I feel like endgame is an artificial wall at the moment due to the fact that at some point I am going to run out of things to do. Granted this will probably happen in most MMO's, I will reference Nexus like I did in my original post and the hunting for stats we did. You didn't have a cap on how much you could progress, it just took increasingly more and more gobs of experience to do it. For that matter, like you brought up, to even get to max level took a lot longer as well.
As I've talked with friends about SWTOR, I'm not campaigning to return to the days it took a literal year to reach max level (not that I'd complain), but we DO need to get back to a good medium. The fact that people were getting level 50 in SWTOR before the early start was even complete is borderline offensive.
I was reviewing posts I made a year or two ago on this site about the very same things that I am now. There is room in the market for MMO's that appeal to people like myself, you, Beau, etc. but the company creating them HAS to realize that they are not going to get remotely close to WoW's numbers and be able to be happy with that. That is the reality of the situation and I'm sure there are developers out there that will be able work under these conditions and for our demographic. The pendulum will swing back our way someday. We just have to wait it out.
Free for All: Looking for experiences, not challenges
Jan 25th 2012 8:11PM (Massively)Back when I first started playing MMO's with things like Nexus:TK and EQ, I never really played the numbers game or paid super attention to how efficient I was being with my time.
Some of my best memories from things like Nexus were the player controlled sub-paths (subsets of classes that were player governed) putting on events that I could participate in. We didn't have an "endgame". You logged on, you played, had a good time and then logged off. You could go progress your character to make him stronger but you didn't have to, so we made our own fun on the side with role-play events and such. To progress a character you could go "hunting" with friends which was just making groups to go plunder mobs for hours while gaining rare items and XP which could advance you in level, or when you hit cap at 99, be used as currency to buy stats for your character.
With EQ I never did quite as much role-playing events as I had in the previous games but I still didn't feel the need to plow my way to the end where "the real game" was waiting for me. I spent my time progressing in levels and picking up experience at the time as to how to effectively play my class in a group (paladin). I still remember fighting crystal spiders in ice caverns to this day because I remember how cool that place looked. I would play for hours just to gain one level a day or every few days but still had a great time just hanging out with people while progressing my character.
Unfortunately, the game-play I just mentioned falls into the category of "grinding" by today's standards. In fact, I see your reference to RuneScape being "grindy" as something that I (and you as well) saw in one of the other articles today where there was a large amount of complaining about grinding in the game and how there was nothing else to do. Don't get me wrong, the term "grinding" was used back then as well but when you didn't want to grind for awhile, you just went and did something else instead.
When I started playing WoW in 2004, I approached it much I had previous MMO's, only this time I had more friends joining me as they decided the barrier of entry was more reasonable (death penalties and such). When arriving at the maxed level, I remember doing many dungeons to get gear and then eventually they released the first raid. Everything felt pretty solid and flowed well in terms of time management it took to get to 60 and get geared and then progress into raiding. There was still grind at times though, but the burden was eased on us.
As the community for WoW grew, the average player was able to aggregate more and more information for themselves to the point that Min/Maxing with parsers from previous games wasn't an aspect of certain players, it became the standard by which we were to play the game by. It started okay for us to play like that, but eventually we started out playing Blizzard's hardest encounters to the point that they had to make them artificially impossible to beat until they deemed us ready to. There was backlash at the time to this design, so they conceded to us by making bosses that were killable but required not even a single person out of 40 to make a single mistake lest we be overcome by a mechanic.
I'm not going to go over the entirety of WoW's history and why it has changed the MMO-scape how we know it. Suffice to say that players of today won't accept things that we took as standard in the past. Going out and hunting creatures for the sport of it is "grinding" and is considered an unacceptable game design. Not allowing us to manipulate every aspect of how our game looks in our client/browser window is being deemed unacceptable. Hell, even being asked to go find a place out in the world before teleporting to it seems to be too much to ask. Playing the numbers game with addons is the "correct" way to play the game now and if you do not, you tend to be shunned. I can't count the number of times I've almost been kicked out of WoW guilds for refusing to use boss mods until I proved I could achieve the mechanics without needing them.
Making everyone feel like they have to game like a pro-gamer to play the game right has hurt the games we love. The average gamer cannot play like that and does not want to. This is why level 50 as a cap in SWTOR was not enough. This is why the concept of needing to get to endgame is a lousy design philosophy. This is why design of our MMOs needs to change again. Games are being built around the "rush to the end first" crowd and they're not giving us content in the middle to care about.
The Daily Grind: Do you buy from a vendor?
Nov 26th 2011 1:23AM (Massively)What you guys are describing here is very much how FF14 attempted to do it with the market wards. Not the first iteration, mind you, but the subsequent ones which by then had become diluted. The unfortunate part is that the majority of the people who were playing FF14 the last time I played, were screaming "Just put in an auction house", "Just put in an auction house!".
Players can't be bothered to add any extra travel time to their purchasing trips, so they demonized the systems that were attempted to put in place there. FF14 literally would let you search for an item, when you found it, send you to the wards and mark on your map who was selling it so you could go straight to the correct vender and purchase it. The vocal players did not care for any feelings of immersion and chided the idea of taking what they believed to be unnecessarily longer to get their item in the end.
Games aren't allowed to feel realistic after all :P With the advent of more and more realistic looking graphics, other systems like instant travel, ebay-esque auction houses and other such conveniences make our games feel less so. I don't wish to get in an argument about whether it's "magic" or not though XD Yes, you can explain it away. Merely making a point about instant gratification rather than having the small things in life.