Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

My #1 complaint with MMO"s?

They lack the one element that carries other online games all by itself.

Skill


What keeps gamers coming back constantly to games like Counter-strike and Starcraft even though they"re long out of date? Is it the amazing loot? Is it a development team constantly producing new content? No, these two games have none of that. What they do have however, is a a game that fosters a nearly unlimited skill curve. That skill curve drives people to personally improve themselves, and keeps them playing the games long after developer interaction has all but ceased.

So the question remains, why not make an MMO that combines the best draws from both MMO"s and skill based games? Where when you look at player skill it"s rich and diverse, rather than "oh is he competent enough to follow raid instructions?". If you could combine a players personal desire to improve himself, with the carrot on a stick rewards that a loot system has, you"d have a game that"d be compelling to which no other MMO has achieved.

Jesus christ guys, read what the man wrote.

He didnt ask you to bitch about shit you want in MMOs or think is lacking.

He said

WHAT IS THE ONE FEATURE THAT *PISSES YOU OFF* THE MOST.

All games require skill. Yeah, FPS games require more than your standard MMO level grind? No fucking way, who knew?!

And you know what, highend WoW raiding right now does take a lot of skill. It can"t require the same kind of twitch skills as FPS because of latency issues, but there is still skill. That"s not really on topic, even though you tried to make it sound like it is.

Vatoreus said:

Or, now stay with me here, it"s gonna get tricky. You make THE WHOLE GAME INTERESTING!



OMFG Revelation, amirite? Leveling is fine, in fact, it"s the fucking STAPLE of RPGs, even the MMO variety. Just make the whole trip fun, filled with interesting stuff, and then you can enjoy the trip. Honestly, EQ2 comes the closest with the leveling thing, I have tons of fun and never feel rushed to see the end game because there is so much to do and see. It"s only when leveling is used as a time sink (Hello, WoW, etc.) that you run into the "OMG need to max level!"

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Good luck with making collecting bear asses interesting.

We"ll wait here while you try.

the one thing I would want to see removed from MMOs is developers asking what the 1 thing players hate about MMOs. Seriously, MMOs are far to complex to be summed up into 1 major flaw that if solved will drop everything else into place. These things don"t exist in a vacuum, and very few of the people complaining about any particular thing can see beyond the thing itself to how its removal is going to effect other aspects of the game.

No one is proposing that fixing one issue will solve all the problems in a game. There are, however, major points of discontent among the player base that need to be addressed, even if it means having to tweak and balance other portions of the gameplay in response. Asking the general public for their opinions on the unappealing characteristics of current MMOs seems like a good start to applying those fixes.

I want to make a comment on the question of the "One feature that pisses you off the most". Albeit not a feature, the biggest thing far and away that has pissed off most gamers the past 10 years hasn"t been bugs. Bugs, stopgaps, timesinks etc are all hot button issues, but not the main thing imo. What really pisses people off is the ignorance, the pride and the ignoring of the player base from the devs and the customer relations team.

If there was one thing I took away from the whole VG breakdown these past few months is that too many developers suffer from group think. Not enough people who can make decisions are willing to take advice from the so-called little people, the players. Whether the devs like or not, we are the MMO Senate and we can dilligently hold any AAA mmo accountable. In EQ, they didnt listen, in VG they didnt listen in EVE they arent listening. The inner-circle of upper managment and game designers refusing to hearken to the voice of the community and force-feeding us with game content becuase God hath bestoyed them the immortal honor of decision maker and almighty game designer - and them, not us know whats best for us. Thats what pisses us off most above anything else.

Just dont forget who pays who.

The Golden rule: he who has the gold, rules.


my opinion.

Number one complaint? Lack of player cities. SWG sucked ass in so many ways, and even its player city implementation was half-assed, but despite its shortcomings it still added a dimension to the game that made it fun to play for hours and hours on end despite the appalling lack of dev-made content. PvP + player cities = hours of fun. Even if all you can do is stand in the middle of their town talking smack and keeping them in their houses, that"s good fun.

Duppin said:

Good luck with making collecting bear asses interesting.

We"ll wait here while you try.

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Anyone with common sense would read what I wrote, see that bear-ass collecting isn"t interesting, re-read what I wrote, and see that it not being something fun, would fall into my "needs to be changed" area of "lame MMO design". But, again, that whole common sense thing.

Thing that pisses me off the most is to be asked to get x number of heads from boars or whatever, and then find that only 1 in 5 boars has an effing head, I mean its bad enough to have such lame kill task quests but ffs make it at least coherent in purpose.

My biggest gripe with current MMOs is the "low common denominator" applied to everything, but maybe the top end raiding content.
Everything is accessible by everyone because having the lowest skill bearable player or the above average player, doesn"t change the outcome of a fight 9 times out of 10.
You can have a barely decent tank or a great tank, but it doesn"t matter, both are going to finish the dungeon crawl.
Playing has become a lot more gear based than skill based and that imo is the wrong approach.

I"m not against content that is for everyone, but there should be some content that is for the best ones, the worse ones can and usually will learn to play better and finish the dungeon as well, given enough trial and error.

Think of a dungeon: the entrance area is something even semi retarded people should be able to face, after that there is an area where you actually need to know what a tank and a healer are, then you should progress down meeting harder and harder encounters, to the point where the last boss is a fight that requires a good degree of skills (and not just gear checks).

This trend has to do with the old paradigm of fight durations; I think all devs around the world have a golden rule that says: "have them meet 100 encounters before reaching the end", where 99 of them are 8-15 seconds fights. It"s wrong, period. You cannot toss enough DPS on something and be sure to kill it. Less fights, more strategic decisions to be made.

If you ever bothered to do dungeons in 2 or 3 players, in both WoW and EQ2, you discovered how a fight should be: longer, harder, adds play a major role, roamers are more dangerous and the whole thing is more rewarding (loot-wise at least, if not just for the e-peen factor).

Developers balance "pulls" based on the average full group, but it"s not "average" enough. If you want to win every fight in every game (group content only), bring enough dps and you win. There are exceptions, but not enough of them to be worth mentioning.

Guess I"ll toss my opinions on the pile.

First, +1 to wodin"s post. Poor mechanics have a nasty habit of biting you in the ass. I strongly reconsidered re-subbing to WoW when the nerf to illumination went through, bringing it down from max 100% manacost reduced to max 60% manacost reduced. It shows me that blizzard IS trying to look ahead to the future of the game. Just throwing that out there, because I think it is a very important point, and I don"t want it to get lost in the subjective rambling about trade skills and what have you.

For my own opinion, I"d like to put down my largest pet peeve as poor character class structure. I think most people rate classes as overpowered or underpowered based on PVP. And when you look at the mythos of a Rogue or Thief class, it"s supposed to be untouchable. To have good player vs player interactions, there needs to be a back-and-forth mechanic. There"s more than that, but that"s one of the pieces. So if you try to make a rogue class in an MMO, you have a problem. Either you fail at creating the mythos, and your untouchable ninja is going to get two-shotted, or your rogues ARE untouchable, and you fail at creating a balanced game. And as a note on that, player perception plays heavily into that. The number"s I"ve heard for customer satisfaction are 1:5, meaning if your company fucks up ONCE for a customer, it"s going to have do a satisfactory job FIVE more times before that customer will consider your company a good company again. Meaning if rogues are two-shotting classes 1/5th of the time, having roughly even fights 3/5ths of the time, and getting two-shot 1/5th of the time, NOBODY thinks rogues are balanced.

I think mechanics feature very heavily into this. There"s all sorts of scaling that WoW really missed the boat on. Only some classes at release scaled with gear, other classes scaled their power up only with levels. Also, on a slightly different axis, classes such as Paladins in WoW become drastically more powerful the more allies they are around. Conversely, other classes like warlocks, which rely on single-target avatar control for defense, become hamstrung once multiple people are on them. Scaling doesn"t mean just gear and levels, but also utility across different numbers of people.

I guess you could sum up my pet peeve with MMOs as this. WoW is excellently crafted, but poorly designed. I want to play an MMO that is excellently crafted, AND excellently designed.

Vatoreus said:

Anyone with common sense would read what I wrote, see that bear-ass collecting isn"t interesting, re-read what I wrote, and see that it not being something fun, would fall into my "needs to be changed" area of "lame MMO design". But, again, that whole common sense thing.

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Go watch the latest podcast from WAR on quests. He talks about bear claws, but it"s the same thing.

Vatoreus said:

Anyone with common sense would read what I wrote, see that bear-ass collecting isn"t interesting, re-read what I wrote, and see that it not being something fun, would fall into my "needs to be changed" area of "lame MMO design". But, again, that whole common sense thing.

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It"s interesting you would accuse me of not reading what you wrote, since it was pretty clear from your original post that you didn"t read what I wrote (i.e. it"s very rare that the time spent attempting to make the inherently boring early parts of character development are worthwhile and it"s better to just let people comparatively skip to the end and spend time on THAT instead).

But back to the thread! I also still hate gnomes.

Duppin said:

.... it"s very rare that the time spent attempting to make the inherently boring early parts of character development are worthwhile and it"s better to just let people comparatively skip to the end and spend time on THAT instead.

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Then it is up to the game makers to makeallparts of the game interesting, not just the end game. What makes these games interesting for me, and others im sure, is the slow progression and build up of power and skills over time. Exploring and discovering new content along the way. Without this you might as well just play a fps or Guild Wars. I dont want this part ofthe rpg to be taken away.

And then what? You will still complain that the "trash" be taken out ofthe dungeons too? Then get rid of all travell,world...etc. Because its not fun and boring, right? And then we will all just login at 7:00PM and go kill 10 bosses in our own little instances that we teleport into for 2hours and log off?

Maybe a nitche type game could be made for folks which only like to raid and do "end game" content over and over. But I definitely dont want a game like that. To me the leveling part is not boring, and will never get boring. Because I love RPG games which are all intrinsically "leveling up" games.

Actually I often find the early levels far more entertaining than the end levels. Found that to be the case in EQ, WOW and LOTRO. It is at the end that I get bored.

Draegan said:

Go watch the latest podcast from WAR on quests. He talks about bear claws, but it"s the same thing.

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See, but that would require me having any interest what-so-ever in that game, which I just don"t have.


At all.

What keeps gamers coming back constantly to games like Counter-strike and Starcraft even though they"re long out of date?

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I"d have to vote for "custom user generated content" to be honest. Variety and freshness are what will keep people coming back in the long run. Eventually a game is just gonna get stale, no matter how godly you are at it. Don"t forget that CS itself was a solution for HL becoming "boring". Team Fortress was a solution to the Quake MP which began to grow stale. In CS itself, mods like Zombie help keep it interesting. Desert Combat or that realism mod kept people in BF42. And look at WC3...DOTA keeps thousands of people playing that otherwise would have uninstalled WC long ago. And after awhile, when the custom stuff becomes boring, you can go back and enjoy the vanilla game for a bit.

While skill, or rather the perception of skill, will keep you in the game, the variety offered by custom content allows for a game to live on far far longer then it normally would.

Campa said:

I loved mining in UO since:

• you didn"t have to run all over the place to find ore, any mountain would do
• if you used a special pickaxe to get a better quality ore it had the chance to spawn an Ore Elemental on you, which typically dropped decent loot

The amassing of materials should NOT be the timesink for crafting IMO.

I want MMOs to make crafting matter and let players create items that aren"t completely dwarfed by dropped or quested loot. But the question is how do design a system where anyone can do it easily but at the same time offer an advantage to a dedicated crafter??

I think LOTRO"s mastering system is a step in the right direction. Perhaps they could expand on it with an experimentation system where a master crafter could take a combination of mob drop resources & crafter resources to experiment at making new items. The more times you succeed at creating something new you would advance your experimentation skill. The higher you got the better the new items you could discover/create.

I would probably even extend it to be race/faction/region based so that you have to "grind" on different experiment techniques. So once you"ve mastered the Bree-land Humans experimentation techniques you could go work on another "Factions" techniques.

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LOTRO"s system was good until you get GM and then it"s like... mehhhh. It"s just farming all over again. Even worse in some cases, the shit they want you to get for stuff that will be necessary to raid (brilliant tokens for example) is insane. 6 beryls per 6 people per 15 minutes in a raid - have fun fuckers!

Anyway, there sure seems to be a lot of "fuck, UO owns" sentiment on these boards lately.

Faille said:

the one thing I would want to see removed from MMOs is developers asking what the 1 thing players hate about MMOs. Seriously, MMOs are far to complex to be summed up into 1 major flaw that if solved will drop everything else into place. These things don"t exist in a vacuum, and very few of the people complaining about any particular thing can see beyond the thing itself to how its removal is going to effect other aspects of the game.

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True that!

IMHO, Developers need to stick to their guns. Listening to players is all well and good, but building a game around AVOIDING certain aspects is just silly. A GOOD game will survive despite flaws, because the whole thing fits together well. It"s not a piecemeal of good things from other games - it"s a solid game, with solid mechanics, and a solid story. In a well-integrated game like that, there may be less-enjoyable portions but that"s the nature of the game and the nature of the genre. Trying so hard to avoid certain things and cater to others without a good overall plan will not end well (Vanguard, for instance).

TwiNCannoN said:

LOTRO"s system was good until you get GM and then it"s like... mehhhh. It"s just farming all over again. Even worse in some cases, the shit they want you to get for stuff that will be necessary to raid (brilliant tokens for example) is insane. 6 beryls per 6 people per 15 minutes in a raid - have fun fuckers!

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Ya LOTRO definitely suffers from the lack of material supply problem that I wish we could get away from and that definitely have a lot of stupid designed into some things current (*cough*shield spikes*cough*). But I do think the system design itself is pretty good and could get a lot better.

Anyway, there sure seems to be a lot of "fuck, UO owns" sentiment on these boards lately.

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That"s because it did.

Hell just the talk about UO we"ve had on the boards the past week or so has been making me want to try out the new client but then I think about the fact the AoS item bullshit is still there and I remember why I left.