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

They say they have not given up so when is the AMA with brad?

Habakkuk_sl said:

Or well "payed". *snicker*

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we'll plaid

Post kickstarter plan lol. These motherfuckers need to get the memo. They aren't going to make this game. Give it up. Go work at Starbucks.

Oloh_sl said:

I haven't mentioned one thing about a business model or whether or not this game would be financially viable. I said what I would like to play. Although, if you took more than 30 seconds to think about it, what I think you will find is that the majority of the people following my way of thinking say essentially, "make a great PvE game, and then turn on PvP" as the starting point. So, dipshit, to achieve financial success, even if you are 100% correct in your view of what the community wants, you would have your 'PvE game" for the 8,000,000 folks that like that. Just flip the switch on a server for me and mine.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what EQ did.

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But you are such a small minority to a playerbase that no sane developer, especially this project is going to devote resources to a PvP server going in. I think you simplify it a whole lot by saying 'flip the switch'. I think a whole lot more goes into it, it's probably one of the reasons Brad and Co. don't even want to discuss it since there needs to be substantial demand. Right now there isn't even demand (if you go by the KS) for the PvE game.

Gaige_sl said:

Post kickstarter plan lol. These motherfuckers need to get the memo. They aren't going to make this game. Give it up. Go work at Starbucks.

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They've learned their lessons this time , I promise. It'll be better. Really.

lol these people

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Oberon 12 minutes ago

pet class with necro path and magician path seems like a strong possibility to me!
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kallafon 14 minutes ago

Still hoping we'll get a pet class that can either be a necromancer or a summoner class that can call on elementals.

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Big Flex_sl said:

lol these people

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Every game has crazy fans backing it, no matter how small it is. Some liked Horizons too.

Isn't Horizons the Bowman guy who shafted his ISP on bills owed for server hosting ?

Tide27_sl said:

Making a game that is centered around PvP being the controlling factor of the game would be financial suicide. All you mouthbreathers that trumpet PvP like its the second coming of Christ can stuff it. PvP, while a fun diversion, would be an epic disaster for most subscribers. There is a reason that WoW had 5 million PVE servers and only a handful of PvP servers. There was a reason that EQ was 90% PVE servers and only 10% PvP servers.

You mention how it felt to be the number 2 guild on non pvp server, well I can tell you that from the top guild is just as fucking boring. 4am phone call to wake up to kill some trigger event mob so guild B couldn't progress content sure was engrossing! /boggle. We were number 1 on the server because we had the most people with highest playtimes and could block any guild from gearing up, not because of some elite skill.

You are wanting to take an already niche market, and then even break that down to a much smaller niche crowd of the niche market. For as much shit as you talk around here about development, you don't know a damn thing about a successful business model.

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But name a mmorpg that DIDN'T have pvp, even such to the point they spent considerable time on its development and place in the game.

In short, you loser.

I always found it odd that PvP proponents seldom wish to impose their preferences on anti-PvP people, and simply want a separate and optional rule set server to choose from whereas anti-PvP people often zealously wish to impose their preferences on the admittedly smaller PvP enthusiast crowd, and rally against any PvP development or servers, marking said attention or resource allocation that absolute hallmark of business suicide or resource misapplication. Often extremely vocally and emotionally involved.

I've seen it in almost every AAA title I've followed, and even on smaller projects like EQClassic. Boggles the mind.

"NO! NO PVP! NONE FOR ANYBODY D:" Saw this on the EQC forums a while ago, as an example.

Generally I find it the opposite. The small minority of overtly vocal pro PVP people want the ability to gank on demand and if they don't get it, they are mad.

No, no Frontiers! We want item loot! We want to cause pain!

Generally, if people really wanted to PVP, they'd go play LOL or DOTA, but by and large what they really want is to grief, which is why they are mocked by the normals.

I'm totally cool with servers dedicated to PVP. What irks me is when games I enjoy end up fucking up classes and their overall game to 'balance' or fix things. Really hate that shit.

gogojira_sl said:

I want a PVE focused game where all class tweaks are based on that style of gameplay, but then there's a server that checks the box next to "can kill other people and shit." Basically what I perceive EQ to have been.

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There you go. Thats exactly it.

I think PvP got screwed when some games conflated the two and made changes to classes based on PvP.

I personally really enjoy PvP, so I would like to see it too but I'm not expecting it here.

Kirun_sl said:

I'll turn it around on you. Name me a niche, "hardcore" game that was released, whichwasn'ta buggy, unfinished mess. Because let's face it, even Everquest was a buggy, unfinished mess. The vast majority of what made that game fun, was entirely the result of bugs/unintended workarounds that the devs let fly. People justthinkthat it was a constant haven of fun, because nostalgia is a powerful drug. Everquest worked so well for two very large reasons: lack of competition and the fact that we didn't know any better. The latter is the biggest contributor to its success, but was possible due to the former.

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I don't think EQ was a superior game at all to WoW; for example. And I don't think every aspect was fun, it had a huge amount of problems. The point is that yes, no game with a well executed hardcore rules was every released; a lot of those rules create a different play aesthetic and a different kind of game. Without a proper investment, we've never seen if an innovation path following those choices would have been successful. I think it actually says a lot that EQ was such a cluster fuck yet still managed to grow the market as much as it did (Yes, even given the lack of choices. Lack of choice doesn't always make a game succesful--there WERE other choices at the time, don't forget and they were there before EQ. It was a combination of limited choices AND certain design elements in EQ---that's why it was no surprise WoW copied EQ and say, not UO.)

So why look back to EQ if WoW grew the market even more? Well, lets put it like this. game designers often use one overarching "premise" to unify design goals. When Blizzard looked at WoW; it's obvious what their premise was---Accessibility. And you know what? They mastered it. What people are curious about is if a team of similar skill had gone back, looked at the genesis of MMO's or the market around Vanilla and changed the "unifying design goal" to "depth" or "breadth" or "consequence".

Would taking different aspects of that initial hardcore genre, and enhancing them, rather than sanding them all down, have produced perhaps an innovative MMO? We don't know, because the only successful trend we've seen has come from accessibility increases. There hasliterallynever been awell executedtrend in another direction. And that's because this market is actually still really young. (To begin using another car example; we're in the roaring 30's of MMO design, the "model T" or first mass production model, IE WOW, went one direction--we're just now wondering if other directions can be explored. But the cost of that exploration might still be too high. )

Kirun_sl said:

Now, pretend you're an investor, being pitched the idea of "Everquest, done right!". Are you going to invest in that project? As soon as you're pitched the idea, you'd laugh them out of your office. These "hardcore" MMOs don't get made not because there isn't a market for difficulty(look no further than Darksouls),

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Lets be clear, if I were to put on my finance hat and do what I do in the real world? Not only would I tell you never to invest in a "hardcore MMO"---I'd tell you never to invest in this market, unless your game is going to be ported to phones and has a commitment quota of about the time of the average office visit wait time.

The MMO market, right now? Is a money pit of bad options, with a few gold nuggets perhaps buried under it (And not something someone without excess capital should get into). Right now, if the market doesn't try something new, they will continue to lose to WoW because actual gameplay in an MMO is trumped by the social networking behind the game and population allowing access within the game. So even if someone does make a true WoWClone with thesametechnical expertise; eventually people will just go back to WoW anyway because most likely WoW still has a better population. If you try to "innovate", the risk becomes astronomical. We literally don't know the outcomes here, because other systems, again, literally have not been tried and even market research will only be dipping into populations that have no experience with the kinds of products we're asking for (Again, going back to the horses statement).

So absolutely not, I'd never recommend this to an investor; ever. But that goes for the whole market outside of micro transaction, discreet play MMO's like WoT or LoL. Other than that? You can't fight WoW on WoW's terms, there are too many inherent advantages with "population" wealth in this market. And you don't wan to be the guy who lays money out for innovation---leave that to the sharks (Publishers) who can sap blood from a stone, and resell said blood to zero out losses, if things go south.

Kirun_sl said:

I don't believe that you're going to get innovation by calling back to mechanics that are 15+ years old. Once the automobile was here, people didn't ask for Ford to then go back and try to recreate a faster horse.

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But they did go back and break down the automobile and build it different; until finally the market matured and they began making essentially niche automobiles to appeal to all their market trends. You see the difference between a mature market? And a high risk, young market?

No one is saying those mechanics, without iteration, are innovative in and of themselves (Well, okay, a few people are ). What they're saying is there were other ways for EQ mechanics to grow, outside of the way they grew with Blizzard. Imagine if after the Model T, ford's next design only focused on faster engines; and he made billions.....But then every car after only kept making faster engines. No one experimented with say; increasing gas mileage, increasing off road capability, increasing cargo room----we'd have huge potentials in the market that went' unexplored because everyone followed one trend due to it's success and the capital risk of failure. A minor version of this actually happened to the American car industry, and it's PART of why Toyota beat America's ass so bad our car companies had to cry for a time out . (On that note though, the assembly line allowed for more niches because it became cheaper to offer them; and I think the next big step in MMO's will happen the same way. As tools become easier to use, you'll see the market be taken by niche games. EQN is actually doing that, making the tools so easy it can be "assembly line" crowd sourced.)

The main point though is that looking to the past, at a product that "grew" your industry, can beinvaluablein order to find ways to innovate. Right now, only two products really GREW the market; they were EQ, and WoW Vanilla/TBC: every product since those has just shifted the market around a little. Maybe there were mechanics in EQ, that if iterated on and made better, might actually grow the market (My baseline would be WoW vanilla though).

So yeah, no one would ask for better horses after the car---but horses didn't grow that market. That's the difference. The first car DID grow it, so you go back and you check why people liked it, and then you build cars into those niches to see which one people like. This is an expensive and long process for any market---but it's essential for a market to mature. WoW has pretty much brought us as far as accessible is going to go; EQN/L seem to have gone back, taken the "breadth" (freedom) aspect of EQ and made that their primary goal, while including the best lessons of WoW accessibility that won't interfere with their new design goal.

What people want to see, I think, is someone doing that with say; competition in MMO's. Or other "hardcore" aspects. See what might happen if you make a niche game AND execute it well, while including as many aspects of current innovations as you can that don't interfere with your design goal. We might not have a mature enough market for that--because the tools for MMO's haven't allowed them to be made cheaply enough yet for that kind of innovation. But I'd be willing to bet that such innovation, even if it comes from the past, is the future. (IE the future of MMO's will be niche games, based on rough aspects of EQ and WoW vanilla and even UO.)

gogojira_sl said:

I want a PVE focused game where all class tweaks are based on that style of gameplay, but then there's a server that checks the box next to "can kill other people and shit." Basically what I perceive EQ to have been.

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If you design a game around PvE and then you throw in a server that just 'flips the switch', you wind up with a horribly imbalanced PvP game. The game you're wanting isn't EQ PvP, it's DAoC. That game was designed for both PvE and PvP in mind.

Vandyn_sl said:

If you design a game around PvE and then you throw in a server that just 'flips the switch', you wind up with a horribly imbalanced PvP game.The game you're wanting isn'tEQ PvP, it's DAoC. That game was designed for both PvE and PvP in mind.

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Some of us liked EQ PvP, and have our own opinions and preferences distinct from yours.

Hey guys, how's things going?