The Elder Scrolls Online

Draegan_sl said:

And Grim, I know it's hard for you to grasp certain concepts, and it's difficult for you to follow complex thought processes, but let me break it down for you one more time. In the context of current games, where the leveling process is quick, creating the majority of your content for leveling is a waste of time. Why not create content where the majority of your player base is sitting at?

If you put the context of the game that long leveling times are good and you make a game based on a very long leveling curve; then yes, leveling content is not wasted dev time. However no one is making a game like that today, at least not on the AAA level. So forgive me if when I say "a lot of leveling content is a wasted resource" because games today are designed for you to hit level cap within the first month of gameplay while the game is designed to be exciting and entertaining for months.

And to everyone else, yes I fucking love rushing to the level cap. There is nothing more entertaining than racing to max level. I love racing. The most fun times I've had in online games is that first weekend where I spend 80 hours of almost no sleep playing a stupid game.

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Draegan McWoWstar.... get a grip it is your myopic viewpoint and lack of reading comprehension that is your problem. I would welcome a game like that the one you are suggesting. It would be great to have more variety in the mmo game space. What I have an issue with is your inability to understand that some people like game play elements that you do not. And they are not lesser human beings because of it. And devs who create games for people not like you are not wasting time.

Draegan_sl said:

I agree 100%. No LOTRO style achievements where you get bonuses after you killed your 1000th orc. Achievements in this system would have to be on the order of killing the big bad guy of the zone (typically the end guy in a zone quest line in today's game). But in order to kill him you need to collect pieces of a staff to break his magic shield, so that may take like 10 steps. Completing each of those 10 steps is an achievement.

Then you can toss in fun shit like, jump off a cliff that is higher than 200 feet. Or kill 10 mobs in 10 seconds. Or run from Point A to B in 1 minute. Or complete dungeon X in 5 minutes. I like simple challenges like that to augment to fun story stuff.

This way you have people focusing on the zone and story, not the task list to the side of your screen. You start paying attention to the world around you and not your day job. Just my opinion though.

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im not sure how you figure this. If you dont have quests, that achievement list is the new task list on the side of my screen. Ill power through it the same way i do quests. hell, this way i dont even have to focus on the zone or story at all, just going to point a and point b where i can complete achievements. only thing it does is eliminate the quest giver so i never have to interact with a npc at all.

Yup you certainly didn't read my post just like I thought you wouldn't.

Utnayan_sl said:

Or theirs might be to have the most fun possible as well doing the first. No one is right. It's all how you want to play. Designers get into trouble when they don't realize the genre they are in.

With that said the equation is pretty simple. Longer leveling curve, more zone content, no instancing, server based = player community, interaction, and less accessibility. The other way is getting content you want to play and having it there when you want it. I don't think we will see much of the former anymore - not because it is bad, but because the market content consumption model has shifted and shown enormously advanced profits and revenue towards the latter. When you get a company that doesn't care about blowing it out of the water from a profit center but can still have enough resources to design a game of this calibur, there will be move movement.

For example, if I win the lottery, I guarantee you I will make one.

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bingo. this was the point i was really trying to convey. i don't see any reason why you can't do both. i think EQ did both very, very well. not initially, as there wasn't really much of an end game before ROK came out. but ROK and SOV had a great mix of excellent end game content as well as great dungeons/areas to level in that had awesome rare drops (like seb and KC) that masked a lot of the leveling experience (especially from 50 to 60). you don't need endless retarded, meaningless quests to do in order to level/advance your character. camping and dungeon crawling in EQ did both nicely because while you were leveling up, you were also hoping (and praying) for that rare named to spawn with the rare loot. although i played a lot pre kunark, i was more of a casual player until ROK was released where i finally joined a hardcore raiding guild and only then did i really make a push to 60 so i could raid with the guild, but i still had a lot of fun leveling up, and doing the raid encounters going forward once i hit max level. in conclusion, i don't believe you have to get rid of leveling altogether, i just believe like ut and grim have said, model your game so that it has everything for everyone, at least as much as possible. i think EQ during the ROK, SOV era did an excellent job of this and i haven't seen a game really come close to doing it as well since.

Byr_sl said:

im not sure how you figure this. If you dont have quests, that achievement list is the new task list on the side of my screen. Ill power through it the same way i do quests.

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You are correct after a fashion, but it's a matter of perception to me. Just like when EQ players who were used to grinding mobs forever came to WOW and though having a check list of things to do was 100x better, this to me is the next evolution. WOW just hid the fact you were grinding 100 mobs to level with lists of different kind of mobs, and sometimes stuck random objectives in there. This method is simply hiding that you are doing 100 quests in achievements.

People hated mindlessly grind mobs so WOW hid it with quests. Now people hate mindlessly collecting 10 bear asses, so this new game is going to hide that. You just have to cleverly design content so it takes the same amount of time, and it's rewarding you along the way with gear and stuff. There are a lot of different things you can do with the system I think that make it less task and quest hub like and more adventure-esque feeling.

In the end it's all about how you tie the bow around playing the game, because you can break it down to being the same shit no matter what. You're still pressing a button and swinging your sword at an orc.

I actually do not care about how progrssion is set up in a game. It can be achievment, skill based or level based and it is all the same. What matters to me is the time it takes to reach the pinnacle of the character and can it be done alone or do you need other players.

The thing I miss in the current games is what to me defines the very idea of a multi player game. I miss a person having a reputation. I go out and find a like minded group sitting at a camp. I join this group and for an hour we kill/explore. One person then leaves and another joins. This person however goes AFK a lot or "tells" the group how they should be playing and just annoys everyone in the group. I miss games where I could choose to not ever group with this person again. I miss consequences of a player's actions. Everquest had a ton of drama associated with guild officers, item thieves, and game hackers. Once a player was infamous, they essentially either enjoyed thier infamy or had to reroll completely and start the process over again. There were no server transfers or name changes and leveling actually took a while and so starting over also took a while.

This is what I miss the most in modern games. A need for community to advance a person's character beyond just the level cap was what made Everquest the game still talked about to this day.

I will have to admit: if doing 5 jumping puzzles in GW2 would have yielded me one of my Ranger spells, I would certainly have done them, and gotten a good feeling out of it, even though I am just a low/moderate fan of those puzzles. Combine them with a tangible reward and they will become more fun.

Right now, I look at the list of 27 unfinished jumpingpuzzles in my Achievement panel, each yielding 10 "points" of nothing, and I can't even be bothered to do a few of them.

Wrapping up the pellet(reward) in a good way does make a difference. The problem is that there are also people that truly hate those puzzles(or simply can't do them) and they would create hell on forums. Level progression through experience does even out that sort of thing, it is definately easier for devs to create a more level playing field that way (another tricky subject).

People that hate raiding ----> shitstorm if you need some Raidboss for an achievement/progression. Though stuff like LFR and dynamic grouping/worldbosses sure mitigates those problems.

In my game I don't really care about everyone having equal opportunity to have everything. If you can't do a jumping puzzle you can't have the reward. Get better. I hate how a majoirty of these games, rewards have been marginalized. Can't raid? Well do 5 man's all week and get the same amount of tokens? Can't do 5 mans? Do dailies for 4 weeks!

No thanks. You can't raid? You can't get the uber sword I have. You don't have the coordination to jump on 10 platforms? Well you can't get the Summon Dildoboar skill as a Ranger. Go practice.

Oh yes, the harder the content the better shit you can get from it.
Suck it.

(Just to point out reasonably though, that's not to say that super hard 5 mans can't have almost as good rewards as super hard 40 mans. There are many shades of grey between black and white.)

That's fine. My game is buy to play, no sub. They already bought the game so I'm ok with it. There's also a ton of other content to do, so they can find something else to be good at.

Draegan_sl said:

In my game I don't really care about everyone having equal opportunity to have everything. If you can't do a jumping puzzle you can't have the reward. Get better. I hate how a majoirty of these games, rewards have been marginalized. Can't raid? Well do 5 man's all week and get the same amount of tokens? Can't do 5 mans? Do dailies for 4 weeks!

No thanks. You can't raid? You can't get the uber sword I have. You don't have the coordination to jump on 10 platforms? Well you can't get the Summon Dildoboar skill as a Ranger. Go practice.

Oh yes, the harder the content the better shit you can get from it.
Suck it.

(Just to point out reasonably though, that's not to say that super hard 5 mans can't have almost as good rewards as super hard 40 mans. There are many shades of grey between black and white.)

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you'll probably bash me for saying this, but your game, the game that you want and are describing, is everquest. this is essentially what made everquest so great. you want the best loot? join a top raiding guild and get it. there was no other way. there was no pandering or catering to the weak. you were either a skilled enough player to get an invite into a good guild that could raid and get the best loot, or you sucked and had to lag behind by 1 or 2 expansions to get the loot the elite players already got months (or years) earlier. this method also brought with it all the guild vs. guild server drama which also made the game competitive and entertaining. the race for server firsts and all the drama that went along with fighting over spawns was good times.

Tuco_sl said:

I think the problem would be balancing the world such that you can do the content at achievement level 1 but it's still challenging at achievement level Sean. One option is to steal from Bastion and have items you can equip/select that give +progression/magic find but also make the game much harder. This is also used in Path of Exile in a way (and WoW in raids with hard modes, which is a different problem) and I think giving the player the option to make things harder and get better rewards is a really good choice.

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You're making a mistake there. There's not ever going to be anything challenging in an MMO for the mentally ill (me) or crazy good people and designing around them in any way hurts the experience for everyone else. You shouldn't design around your top 1% or even your top 5%. I wouldn't design around skill level for anything higher than your top 10%. They're going to devour your game no matter what you think you can do to curb them and frankly, they probably do not give a fuck.

I guess so, if the only comparison you are making is that both games would have challenging content. That's kind of where the comparison stop though.

etchazz_sl said:

you'll probably bash me for saying this, but your game, the game that you want and are describing, is everquest. this is essentially what made everquest so great. you want the best loot? join a top raiding guild and get it. there was no other way. there was no pandering or catering to the weak. you were either a skilled enough player to get an invite into a good guild that could raid and get the best loot, or you sucked and had to lag behind by 1 or 2 expansions to get the loot the elite players already got months (or years) earlier. this method also brought with it all the guild vs. guild server drama which also made the game competitive and entertaining. the race for server firsts and all the drama that went along with fighting over spawns was good times.

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Or like the vast majority of EQ raiders, who were god fucking awful, you got carried by the handful of people who knew how to position boss mobs and rode coattails for the entire game.

EQ was not some bastion of skilled top people only making progress. EQ raids were fucking jokes that always came down to a few people setting it up for everyone else while they afk-autoattacked their way to loot.

The revisionist history some of you have about EQ raiding and skill is both disgusting and hilarious.

Yep, you could see that almost immediately in the switch to Warcraft way back when. Some of your 'good' eq players turned out to be just awful at games.

bixxby_sl said:

Yep, you could see that almost immediately in the switch to Warcraft way back when. Some of your 'good' eq players turned out to be just awful at games.

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Yeah, that's why we went from the top #1 guild in EQ to one that did dick all. The vast majority of our EQ members were warm bodies who were carried. When we moved over to WoW most of them just could not cut it and it was far too much for them.

Hell, most of our good members in WoW did barely anything in EQ either, because 99% of it was literally a couple people positioning mobs while our legion of DPS auto-attacked their backs and our healers did a CH chain. Note that we invented CH chains because most of our healers were far too brain dead for us to win with anything else.

I spent pretty much the entirety of Vex Thall playing my PS2 while afking, because there was no reason not to.

Tuco_sl said:

And sean, you make some good points about tuning for the skilled. I think at this point MMOs in general offer very little to me because they are both homogeneous and have a terrible time/content ratio. The only thing that excites me at this point is PVP warfare because how the war plays out has more to do with unique social aspects and less about the game mechanics.

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Yeah, I don't play games for a challenge. I play them to consume content. You cannot design aroundsomethinglike me or people who are insanely good at games.

I do think they need to build MMOs around making them more about the unique social aspects. EQ's designs are absolutelynotthe way to go about that though. People just aren't going to put up with its archaic designs and it really was not as "social" of a game as the few EQ glorifiers left would have you believe either. I also don't think you need to build MMOs around "end-games" and Raiding either.

Sean_sl said:

Yeah, that's why we went from the top #1 guild in EQ to one that did dick all. The vast majority of our EQ members were warm bodies who were carried. When we moved over to WoW most of them just could not cut it and it was far too much for them.

Hell, most of our good members in WoW did barely anything in EQ either, because 99% of it was literally a couple people positioning mobs while our legion of DPS auto-attacked their backs and our healers did a CH chain. Note that we invented CH chains because most of our healers were far too brain dead for us to win with anything else.

I spent pretty much the entirety of Vex Thall playing my PS2 while afking, because there was no reason not to.

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well, you WoW nard danglers are just as hilarious if you think there was anything even remotely difficult about raiding in WoW. neither game was inherently "difficult." winning the masters is difficult, playing a video game is not. but at least in EQ, if you sucked as a player you may not be exposed during raiding, but you sure as shit were in a group. i played both games and didn't find anything about WoW any more difficult than what i saw in EQ. making people hit a button at a specific time or have 40 people circle jerk in unison isn't any more difficult than positioning a mob in EQ and having a MT and a CH chain going.