Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Ukerric_sl said:

Yep. A PVE game needs sharply defined roles in a group, or it degenerates into a every-toon-for-itself-dps-fest.

What a game does not need, however, is a "DPS" role. You have between 3 to 6 core roles that are required: tank, heal, CC, pull/scout, buffing, debuffing. But nobody is "a DPS" because DPS is a filler: it's what you put in your group when you've got your roles, and that's pretty much it. So, by design, everyone should be able to DPS about equally, AND then fill one main role and one secondary role.

If you assume that tank, heal, CC are the primary roles, and pull, buff, debuff are the secondary then you'd get something along the following 9 class breakdown:

Warrior: Tank, Pull
Paladin: Tank, Buff
Shadowknight: Tank, Debuff
Cleric: Heal, Buff
Shaman: Heal, Debuff
Druid: Heal, Pull (why not? They were quad kiters, remember?)
Enchanter: CC, Buff
Necromancer: CC, Debuff
Wizard: CC, Pull

Your group needs 3 of the main role (tank, heal, CC), and 3 of the secondary roles (pull, buff, debuff). And without "switching specs"; your Cleric is capable of doing MT healing AND doing the same DPS as the wizard. You get the benefits of sharply and instantly clear roles (I join a group, I notice a warrior and a SK, my only question is "who's the MT and OT?", not "what's your spec?"), global soloability (with tanks the... best soloers?), and interesting group dynamics (You can have a group with 2 tanks, 3 heals, which is very different from a group with 1 tank, 2 heals, 2 CC).

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Some version of this is exactly what I think is needed. Imo removing roles entirely was a mistake in GW2, with hindsight. It turned everyone into "just" dps, and with their not-so-great buff system even support is best dps. Instead, I would cut dps as a role and allow all classes to do that equally well. Each class does need 1-3 other roles to fill so everyone is wanted in groups, but it shouldnt be for the dps as far as the class abilities are concerned. The difference to GW2 then is that healers, support, crowd control and tanking exist, but all of them are expected to also contribute some dps (how depends on role, doesnt mean everyone swings an axe between doing heals or CC).

I do think tanking and healing became to extreme as games like EQ or WoW aged, to a point where if you arent a tank-specced plate class, it's one-shots for everyone. I think that is to be avoided and the difference between tanks and non-tanks in pure mitigation/avoidance should be smaller, but tank should have the tools to manage agro better then other classes.

Denaut_sl said:

You are missing the point entirely. Finding a different person because they have the right class means excluding one of the people you were going to play with in the first place. The point is that a good MMORPG isn't like a single player game where the game components are what matter most, the strength of an MMORPG ispeopleyou play with.

A well designed MMORPG will make it easy to find and meet new people, yes, but will also make it easy for you to play with the people you want to play with when you want to play with them. Requiring a holy trinity impairs that by forcing you to either exclude someone you like and enjoy playing the game with or possibly forcing you to include someone you don't want to play with simply because of the class/combat system.

Ultimately this decreases the enjoyment of the game and doesn't play to the strengths of the genre.

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For the combat system if there are no roles defining players then there is less coordination. Less coordination means chaotic combat and that's not fun and you lose the feeling of bonding together to over come a challenge. (This was proven over and over and over through the games that tried to implement role-less system).

Also, stop saying Trinity.
We need roles; three are too little in my opinion.

The way EQ did classes was wrong because there were very few healers and Clerics in most cases were the only healers. Made Clerics very hard to find while DPS very easy to find. Design classes where you have variety of Primary and Secondary roles per class (Some classes only focus on one role; some focus on two but are less efficient at it). Just like in CoH where you really didn't need to have a Defender and Controller and Scrapper...etc but you damn sure you would usually be more effective with a variety of archetypes grouping together than just going with the same archetype in the group.

Your logic of "having to disregard class X since you don't need it" is weird... No matter what you do; whoever you pick.. you will always end up with potential X player not being chosen........ RIGHT?! Your argument can make sense if you said "DPS classes will end up having a hard time LFG since there are plenty of them." Okay, that is true for our previous experiences. That's why we need to look at CoH class system as an example of almost succeeding in eliminating this issue and learn to diversify the classes while at the same time giving each player a specific role(s) to play in their group.

Double

Laura_sl said:

For the combat system if there are no roles defining players then there is less coordination. Less coordination means chaotic combat and that's not fun and you lose the feeling of bonding together to over come a challenge. (This was proven over and over and over through the games that tried to implement role-less system).

Also, stop saying Trinity.
We need roles; three are too little in my opinion.

The way EQ did classes was wrong because there were very few healers and Clerics in most cases were the only healers. Made Clerics very hard to find while DPS very easy to find. Design classes where you have variety of Primary and Secondary roles per class (Some classes only focus on one role; some focus on two but are less efficient at it). Just like in CoH where you really didn't need to have a Defender and Controller and Scrapper...etc but you damn sure you would usually be more effective with a variety of archetypes grouping together than just going with the same archetype in the group.

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At no point did I ever say a game shouldn't have any roles. I said that it shouldn'trequirea certain set of roles, specifically the Holy Trinity. In fact, I said in the post before that I quite like roles. There are many problems with "requiring" a certain set of roles, mainly that it is more boring when the solution to every puzzle is the same. It is far more interesting to come up with novel solutions to completing content because there is no clearly superior way to accomplish your goal. You are thinking very, very narrowly about how such a game, and a class system could be constructed.

A fantastic example of a game with strong roles but very flexible role requirements is Global Agenda. That game has the tank and healer roles, but they are in no way required to complete missions (content), and running groups that didn't conform to the Trinity was fun, interesting, and possible.

Your logic of "having to disregard class X since you don't need it" is weird... No matter what you do; whoever you pick.. you will always end up with potential X player not being chosen........ RIGHT?!

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The point is,whoyou play with should be your main concern, notwhatyou play with.

Tmac47_sl said:

This ^



Is totally unrelated to this ^

The two are mutually exclusive. They don't actively influence one another like you're insinuating.

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Actually I wasn't insinuating, it was a continuous, unrelated thought. I should have defined it better in another paragraph.

Tmac47_sl said:

What if you're level 45 (max 50) and there are 50 people on in your level range? However, only 20 of those are part of your faction, and out of these 20 there are only 4 healers (which generally seems to be the case). Now let's say that 2 of them have no desire to attempt the content you're on and the other two are in groups.

So, in this scenario, your suggestion falls flat.

Solving the problemhas a lot more to do withgame designthan just asking people to group with you.

The devs constantly bastardize the population by making design decisions like hard factions and large gaps in level accessible content/gear/etc.

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Am I misreading this, or is your argument, "Its impossible, there isn't a single person my level that is able or willing to group with me"? If your playing on the Vanguard servers then you have a strong argument, otherwise.......

Denaut_sl said:

At no point did I ever say a game shouldn't have any roles. I said that it shouldn'trequirea certain set of roles, specifically the Holy Trinity. In fact, I said in the post before that I quite like roles. There are many problems with "requiring" a certain set of roles, mainly that it is more boring when the solution to every puzzle is the same. It is far more interesting to come up with novel solutions to completing content because there is no clearly superior way to accomplish your goal. You are thinking very, very narrowly about how such a game, and a class system could be constructed.

A fantastic example of a game with strong roles but very flexible role requirements is Global Agenda. That game has the tank and healer roles, but they are in no way required to complete missions (content), and running groups that didn't conform to the Trinity was fun, interesting, and possible.



The point is,whoyou play with should be your main concern, notwhatyou play with.

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Going back to Kunark (2000) or WoW vanilla (2005) I used to do groups for dungeons with pet classes and no real healers (necro+mages) and/or duo/trio in dungeons with the most absurd setup of classes. It doesn't work in raids, but raids are shit anyway and should be deleted, but I disgress.
The main reason behind this kind of grouping was to prove it could be done, to prove it was very fun (most fun ever) even if it wasn't superbly efficient and possibly risky, meaning pretty much nobody was going to even give a try in case they'd be losing time without getting loot shat on them (instant gratification?).

This brings us back to the reason why grinding a dungeon in 7 minutes instead of 15 is even a fucking concern in these games.
Efficiency? Currency? Farmability? It's a load of crap, no wonder these games nowadays last months instead of years. You have to hide the hamster-wheel relationship behind a layer of adventure, exploration, slot-machine effect (drops, rare spawns) and general content depth. Instead we get mass AE pulling to speed up things or worse, skip trash that resets after a few meters by running/stealthing, whatever method is used in such game/dungeon, no loot worth talking about, but a fixed predictable and daily/weekly capped amount of currency.

It's a job, isn't it? Boring, grinding, salary, buy goods with salary. Somebody forgot adventure, fun, emotions, pride, achievements (real ones not the artificial shit we're being fed nowadays).

So, before analyzing in depth why the need for a set of roles, e.g. healing, is better or worse than going all together randomly dpsing whatever is moving, maybe, just maybe, somebody with a bit of talent should think about making something more interesting than a 3d version of diablo3 over and over.

Who I play with? Why is that even a concern? If I'm in a tight group of friends, we decide beforehand who is playing what, more or less covering what's needed, if I meet randoms, I look for those covering the roles I need. I don't really see the issue with that. Every game has a LFD system nowadays, seems to me that waiting 15-20 minutes to do something has to be a terrible experience for somebody, the same somebody who won't even say hello and treat everyone like bots or targets for insults should things not go his planned way.

I just don't think it's such a big deal to be honest.

Tmac47_sl said:

I was in mostly blues and had zero outside help.

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Yeah, that would make a difference. I had already been farming MC for quite a while before they had added that quest so I was pretty much decked out.

Tmac47_sl said:

When you limit the playerbase to hard factions and level restrictions these game mechanics effectively cannibalize the player population. Meaning that you have less opportunity to involve yourself with players or even find players you would enjoy playing with.

What if I role Alliance on Shattered Hand and the perfect guild for me is Horde? It's kind of stupid to limit that player's social interaction to half the player base. Right?

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I never played WOW, but let me try to make an educated guess. If I want to play a DE Necro, and my friend wants to play a Paladin, I start off in Neriak, and he will start off in Freeport. Now getting to him will be a mother.... but there was nothing preventing it aside from location. I'm sure thats not the same example, however all I am arguing for is a return to some of the concepts that Everquest managed to get right, be it on purpose or accident. I don't believe that finding groups was all that difficult(if you were patient, put your name on lists, made friends with clerics/tanks etc...). The better I got as a player, the more I found it unnecessary to even look for groups. I would log on, head to town to stock up on food and get tells to join groups every single night. The system worked. It sure wasn't perfect, but it worked. With today's LFG tools, it should become nearly instant. Wish I had that back in 2002!

Tmac47_sl said:

With every adventure, there is inherent risk.

Honestly, this might have more to do with Generation Me having zero understanding of meaningful relationships or the value of pain. When you're a kid, you can learn a lot from getting hurt. When you're outside and bust your face on the sidewalk, there's a lesson to be learned. When you get bitten by 500 ants in your front yard, there's a lesson to be learned. When you try to stop your bike Fred Flinstone style in the driveway, there's a helluva lesson to be learned...

We've effectively removed a lot of the pain/risk from growing up.

Our culture has cultivated an era of surface level, social-network, interaction over long-term investment and commitment and I think we're reaping in games what our culture has been sowing into for quite some time now.

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You nailed this right on the head. We are being replaced by a new generation of players who have no understanding of being, even in the slightest, independent. While I'm not screaming, "SCREW MAPS", it amazes me how they want every single detail thought out, and provided for them or they simply will not play. I think back to the days of being invited to groups in zones I'd never played in and the directions were, "run straight to the little pond, hang a left follow the wall to the huge cluster of trees, then when you see the rocks, cross the river and were about 100 feet up on the cliff". You tell a new player that today and he logs off never to return. I didn't think it was that big a deal.

Merlin_sl said:

I never played WOW, but let me try to make an educated guess. If I want to play a DE Necro, and my friend wants to play a Paladin, I start off in Neriak, and he will start off in Freeport. Now getting to him will be a mother.... but there was nothing preventing it aside from location. I'm sure thats not the same example, however all I am arguing for is a return to some of the concepts that Everquest managed to get right, be it on purpose or accident. I don't believe that finding groups was all that difficult(if you were patient, put your name on lists, made friends with clerics/tanks etc...). The better I got as a player, the more I found it unnecessary to even look for groups. I would log on, head to town to stock up on food and get tells to join groups every single night. The system worked. It sure wasn't perfect, but it worked. With today's LFG tools, it should become nearly instant. Wish I had that back in 2002!

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Those two aren't even the same. You are saying putting in a few hours of corpse running to get to your buddy. If you are Alliance you literally cannot interact with Horde at all outside of killing them (at least when I played WoW.)

Denaut_sl said:

At no point did I ever say a game shouldn't have any roles. I said that it shouldn'trequirea certain set of roles, specifically the Holy Trinity. In fact, I said in the post before that I quite like roles. There are many problems with "requiring" a certain set of roles, mainly that it is more boring when the solution to every puzzle is the same. It is far more interesting to come up with novel solutions to completing content because there is no clearly superior way to accomplish your goal. You are thinking very, very narrowly about how such a game, and a class system could be constructed.

A fantastic example of a game with strong roles but very flexible role requirements is Global Agenda. That game has the tank and healer roles, but they are in no way required to complete missions (content), and running groups that didn't conform to the Trinity was fun, interesting, and possible.



The point is,whoyou play with should be your main concern, notwhatyou play with.

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I always respected your post.. and I know you worked on VG.. I think VG had enough diversity within it's class system. If we get another mmo with classes like that I'd be happy. Personally I don't need nor do I expect to be picked for a group every time I LFG. It leads us right back to where MMO's are. accessibility has been a trade off that hasn't worked well for my style of gaming. I don't know the full solution but my preference at this point is still Trinity knowing its shortcomings. I can't help it if a group of friends decide they want to play together and nobody wants to be a healer or a tank.. They need to make more friends? That's what my group does when we lack classes. The trinity promotes the social side of the game. It's up to the player to decide if they want to be a part of it. Again, we are hoping for a niche game. This approach would obviously not be something all players are willing to put up with.

Tenks_sl said:

Those two aren't even the same. You are saying putting in a few hours of corpse running to get to your buddy. If you are Alliance you literally cannot interact with Horde at all outside of killing them (at least when I played WoW.)

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Yea I figured I was way off, which is why I made sure to state, "however all I am arguing for is a return to some of the concepts that Everquest managed to get right"...I'm not for separating players so they are unable to group.

Convo_sl said:

I can't help it if a group of friends decide they want to play together and nobody wants to be a healer or a tank.. They need to make more friends? That's what my group does when we lack classes. The trinity promotes the social side of the game. It's up to the player to decide if they want to be a part of it. Again, we are hoping for a niche game. This approach would obviously not be something all players are willing to put up with.

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Well said. I don't understand why asking players to make friends in an MMO that will improve their gameplay experience is so outlandish. I knew two people when I started playing in 00'. By the time I retired in 05', I had, over the course of the game, made at least a hundred or more. And the only thing I had to do was /tell Hey, you wanna join us in "x"(zone)? Or, /tell paying for corpse locate, you bzy?, or /tell paying for port to "x"..... Now when some players refer to this, they consider it being FORCED to group...uhhhh, I WANTED to group. It was fun.

The issue is we can't really "go back" to how it was in EQ. Back in that day finding information on a quest was either impossible or very difficult. In the modern day in age if your quest description is "Go left at the giant oak and stop at the rock" someone will just google that quest and get a nicely drawn map saying what to do. So why not just integrate that anyways?

Also you can +1 me for the "Pro Trinity" camp.

Tenks_sl said:

The issue is we can't really "go back" to how it was in EQ. Back in that day finding information on a quest was either impossible or very difficult. In the modern day in age if your quest description is "Go left at the giant oak and stop at the rock" someone will just google that quest and get a nicely drawn map saying what to do. So why not just integrate that anyways?

Also you can +1 me for the "Pro Trinity" camp.

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Well yea.. anyone can google. That's why I'm interested in SB. Even if it's not as in depth as I hope early on. It may lead to something better down the road. We need to figure out a way for players to not want to go alt tab out to look up a quest. That needs to take place in the game using clues/community. Let's face it.. We have all been doing it since the Nintendo hotline ha. Man my moms face when she got her phone bill the month Simon's Quest came out lol