Tom Chick: MMOs are broken! Fix! The Narrator: No, you mean WoW is broken.
And now we have:
Trembling Hand: Oh come on, they’re broken, fix plz.
So I thought I’d share my jaded, broken-on-the-wheel-of-pain response to the above. A caveat: if someone released a game with all 10 of those points implemented, I’m sure it would be awesome. However — the devil, as always, is in the details.
Thus, I’ll hit these out of order, because some of them are such obvious truths it’s hard to disagree with (even for me, and I’m a professional curmudgeon.)
10) Launch when it’s finished
Yes, that’d be swell. When is finished? When the game is fun? That’d be great. When you run out of money and are going to lay everyone off unless you shove it out the door prematurely? True more times than I care to remember, including some eventual market successes.
But yes, in an ideal world we’d be free of budgetary pressures and, through beneficent overlords careless with cash, or even more unlikely, proper and experienced project management, a game would be developed well, QA’d throughly, beta’d for both fun gameplay and crippling bugs, and release on time and on budget.
Heh. Hah. muahahHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAH. There, I’m done now.
8 ) Make subscriptions cheaper
Hard to get cheaper than “free”, which is rapidly becoming the price point for a lot of new games. But yes, asking for a credit card is a pretty crucial hurdle that is difficult for a lot of games to surmount. So, sure, cheaper is good. Hopefully you can afford to keep that team running and throwing cash at them so they don’t have to release things early!
7) Quality of life 4) Don’t make me grind
Totally agreed here, on both of these. In fact, I’m tempted to combine them and call this the Blizzard Rule. Namely: if your players are playing your game and suddenly think “you know, I could be having more fun playing World of Warcraft right now”? It’s time to break out the “maintenance mode” budget spreadsheets.
3) Make combat smarter
It’d be great if we could. Unfortunately, the Internet intervenes.
Both in terms of lag time (the more complex the interaction between client and server during a time-critical action like, say, combat, the more lag breaks the immersion, or more accurately the outright lie that you’re actually engaging with a game in realtime as opposed to a half-second or so delay) and in terms of, well, people on the Internet aren’t that enamored with complex things. Take Dungeons and Dragons Online – which has precisely the type of combat the original poster proposed. DDO is not, by any stretch, a market success. Now, that’s probably not due to the complex combat system – but by that same token, it didn’t exactly close the deal for selling the game either.
Players, in the aggregate, tend to enjoy simplicity. Sorry. No, really, I’m sorry, I’m the guy who likes insanely overcomplex rules systems. Unfortunately you and I are outliers.
1) Make the worlds more engaging
Also make them fun. And finished. Also, profitable. Anything else? Oh yeah, blue. They should be blue. Blue is cool.
OK, enough sarcasm on that one. Yes, plenty of games fall down in inducing a sense of wonder or even a sense of place that’s critical for the success of a virtual world, probably through a tunnel vision imposed on deathmarching your way through an insane production schedule so you can “release it when it’s finished” before the entire company is laid off. And a lot of that is due to the unoriginal design of many games tasked with “cloning WoW”. It’s really hard to make a coherent world when you’re working off a xerox machine of game mechanics and interfaces.
(By the way, there is not a single MMO designer on the planet who wakes up in the morning with “I’d love to clone WoW” as his or her personal dream. There are many executives, however, who wake up EVERY morning with that dream. Protip: Executives outrank designers.)
By the way, if you’re keeping score, I start tossing bombs in earnest right about…. now.
2) Ditch classes and levels
If I had a quarter for every armchair designer (or actual designer for that matter) I’ve listened to that began their “How I Would Save The MMO Industry Singlehandedly” speech with “ditch classes and levels”, I could fund World of Progressquest singlehandedly. It’s the quickest way to indie cred: instead of saying you really like Angry Johnny and the Killbillies, you say you really wish someone would make a game just like Ultima Online (which effectively had classes and eventually patched them in explicitly) or Asheron’s Call 1 (which had levels as well as implicit classes) or Game No One Has Ever Heard Of But Makes A Ton Of Money And Has No Classes (but does have levels and an insane soul destroying grind) or My Favorite MUD No One Ever Heard Of But It Totally Ruled. Saying “I wish someone would ditch those damn levels and classes” isn’t proposing a game design. It’s proposing the absence of one.
Unless you have a pretty compelling alternative for explaining how people can develop their character without being intimately familiar with the game’s rules (which, mind you, are almost never well documented in any MMO, it’s like some sort of conspiracy industry-wide to refuse to hire a decent web team), you’re simply taking all the design work you’d already have to do in creating skills and abilities, and instead of building them into coherent class sets yourself are saying “screw it – let the players do it. They know better anyway. Plus there’s none of that annoying game balance to worry about! Everybody can be everything, amirite?” (Oh wait, you have this really complex series of checks and balances to make sure you can’t screw up your character or become God of the Tankmages that will mean the game will take 2 years to learn instead of 1 year. Right.)
Ditching levels and classes won’t magically eliminate The Grind: Ultima Online was a horribly, horribly grind-tastic game (hello, GM Blacksmith TWICE, cry for me) and World of Warcraft is pretty grind-free despite being chock full of both classes AND levels. It’s simply another rules system, and by its nature an inherently more complicated one, both to design and more importantly, to play. That doesn’t mean it’s BAD – there’s plenty of successful MUDs that do very well with mature skills-based systems. But just tossing that out as “well, hell, why hasn’t anyone ever thought of this besides ME” ignores, among other things, the fact that this gets proposed and wildly argued over and finally shouted down violently by the experienced and probably drunk senior developer in every MMO designed to date.
Of course, just rehashing D&D over and over again is pretty insane, too.
5) Make mobs smarter
It would be ridiculously easy to make mobs smarter. “Hey, I need to always kill the guy healing people. No, really. Screw you, taunt skill. I’M KILLING THIS GUY. Oh, I’m getting some friends to help. In fact we’re going to loop around from behind to take them by surprise. AND WE’RE NOT STOPPING TILL WE WIN.” It would be the equivalent of That Dungeon Master Guy you all hate who takes great, sadistic, and Aspergian glee in making sure “his” players always die horribly.
This is not an experience people will pay for. Game design, in many ways, is convincing players that they won a struggle against imposing odds. It does not mean actually creating imposing odds.
Also, I have seen metrics prove conclusively, time and time and time and time again, that in a game that *does* have monsters with decent AI and that use strategies that require some thought to defeat, that players will avoid them in droves and seek out the ones with the most brain damaged AI possible.
Players dislike challenge. They SAY they like challenge. They lie.
6) Encourage grouping
Yeah, let’s not go there.
9) Listen to, and engage with, players
The players are often WRONG.
What’s more, they will lie to you.
DIRECTLY.
TO YOUR FACE.
No, really, their class is horribly underpowered, any fool would know that if they only played the game and that bug you’re talking about is really a feature and anyway you shouldn’t remove it because our entire side is underpopulated so it’s only fair.
The players are not the ones at financial risk if your game fails. They simply move on after consuming all you have to offer.
Of course the players are also often right. There’s a whole discipline of development which revolves around figuring out which is which. At least until they figure out they’re the least paid people at the company and move on to junior worldbuilder so they finally get some respect in the break room.
But engaging with players entails the willingness to do some very fundamental things which, to date, have been unpopular with both developers and players.
* Telling players they are wrong.
* Telling dev teams they are wrong.
* Telling players and dev teams that YOU have been wrong.
* Being honest with both players and dev teams.
* Not taking sides with one against the other.
* Not playing favorites with certain players or groups of players.
* Not playing favorites with certain devs or groups of devs.
* Not building up your own personal reputation at the cost of your teams or your community.
* Having skin thick enough to deflect radioactive waste.
* Having the ability to process thousands of often contradictory voices, cleanly, quickly and professionally, without hearing them in your head as an insane cacophany driving you to murder small children.
If you’re not willing to do that – all of that – then the point you ignored will be the point that will hoist you on your petard and do more damage to your community than if you had never engaged with them in the first place. And that is why most dev teams of late just take the path of least resistance and not bother. Because it’s SAFER.
But yeah, you should totally engage with your players, because, hey, they are kind of the reason you’re there. Just be aware you’ll screw it up and cause more harm than good. Also be aware you’re not the first.
So… yeah. Hopefully this gives some idea of the long and brutal path between good intentions and attempted implementation.
It’s HARD, yo.
{ 95 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
As far as a game with no classes…you ever heard of Champions Online??
Different people feel differently about this though. I play EVE online and like it in large part due to aspects that come along with the high death penalty. For example, I don’t have to grind endlessly to get competitive PvP gear precisely because people lose their gear when they die. Nobody is going to camp Eramai for weeks on end if they’re going to have to do it again the next time they’re face down in the dirt. So, as a whole, I spend more time doing things I like.
Player’s do like challenge, they just don’t like to be punished for losing. Ultimately, that’s what MMOs do, progress quest design principles are directly at odds with challenge oriented gameplay for everyone but a small portion of hardcore players.
Not that Saints Row 2 is particularly challenging, but I can fail a mission 5 times in a row and while somewhat frustrating, is no biggie due to their check point system. If I had to run out and buy more ammo or make more money between each failure, then it goes from somewhat frustrating to nerd rage.
But players are people and people are sheep, and while they enjoy challenge, you need progress quest mechanics to keep people playing month in and month out. So, you kind of have to throw challenge out the window.
An interesting thing about this genre is how over the generations the feature set has been paired down. If you collect the most common requests from MMO gamers, you’d have a feature set that resembles UO: skill based leveling, housing, boats, pvp, fully interactive itemization, etc.
Lum-
Been reading your stuff since the to LtM days, and I find myself generally in agreement with your design/content related views.
@Bitwraith: I’m an MMO gamer, been one since the dawn of EQ (missed the UO boat playing paper RPs with friends) and I wouldn’t notice if every game designed going forward skipped PvP entirely. And, for me, the sole purpose of ingame housing is storing crap…large vaults and instant toon to toon mail removes that need.
Which brings me to my point: Reality is a pain, but it separates what CAN be done from all the “gosh, wouldn’t it be nice” plans. Money drives development, and money follows success. Tabula Rasa exists because of the success part…it doesn’t because of the reality part.
I don’t have much to add. This was one of the most thought provoking posts, and discussion chains, I’ve stumbled across in a while. SiliconMage’s comment seemed exceptionally insightful.
On the whole classes’ levels issue:
I personally enjoy classes because they present a well organized, and functional, set of themed abilities for me to explore. They increase replay value by segregating abilities off between different characters. And finally, they make a new game much easier to get going in. Choose a role and go.
That said, hybrid systems have enjoyed quite a bit of success in offline RPGs. For example, KoTRO I and II actually had a very flexible skill / talent system meshed seamlessly with a class/ level system. Those were mainstream successes by any standard. Morrowind, Fallout, and Fable also use hybrid systems. From this it follows, in my mind, that a pure class system is not the only recipe for mainstream success.
Certainly balancing a less restricted system then a pure class system can be challenging. However, I suspect that the market will embrace systems that have a higher learning curve than “pick a class” if it’s embedded in a quality product.
I just wandered in here, long-time gamer, not much interested in the development process, just want to have fun. Play WoW now.
I enjoyed this piece because for the first time in my life I felt that someone in the development community was honest with me. Maybe that lack of trust was why I never cared to complain or get interested, just move on to the next game. But perhaps I just never really understood where developers where coming from, having never been involved in the biz.
I have some things to think about now. Maybe more than I really want to. Thanks for writing this.
10) Launch when it’s finished
This is really old, outdated, and not the future.
Launch often and never stop. The first launch is the press release saying the game is being made, it is just content, and it never really stops even when the lights go out. There is still a lot to learn for history for example.
“Release when it’s finished”– Bullshit. They go so over budget they can’t invest anymore. This means they would actually take a chance with their current investment rather than pump more money into it… that’s obviously a desperate measure. It should read 1)Don’t run out of money.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of posting a rebuttal in Trembling Hand’s comments.
As a long-time designer of all sorts of games, let me add my minor notes:
10. Launching — the best hope is to launch well. MMO’s are never finished, but if your launch goes badly, it doesn’t matter what other plans you might have down the line.
3. Combat Smarter — the goal is not to make combat more complex, but to increase the player’s depth of options. Those that want a simple fight can continue that way, others can tinker to their heart’s content.
2. Amen. I’ve tried both. Classes win. They provide consistent expectation, definition of role, clarify grouping (try LFG in a freeform skill system), create content, establish limits, and, yes, simplify balancing (which is still damn hard). Given the choice to learn anything, the majority of players try to do everything and don’t do well at any of it — because the game system, content and world encourage diversity (to do this quest chain you need X, for combat you need Y, etc.). Player’s aren’t keen on imposing limits on themselves, but are much more accepting of limits established from the start. At the extreme Skill-based systems can also discourage grouping, since there is no inherent specialization. I’ve got nothing against a system that does without classes, but it has to address all of the above (and more).
5. As I have explained to designers on various teams, “The goal of a good AI is to lose gracefully.” Making AI’s win is easy. Making them lose well is harder.
9. There is an art to listening to players. While I’m not so utterly cynical to say they all lie, most of the time they don’t say what they really want. The trick is to listen to what they’re saying and then figure out what the real problem/answer is. Players usually describe a symptom as if it were the cause. “My class is too weak” could really be “My class doesn’t have enough interesting things to do,” or “My abilities encourage less than optimum tactics for my class” or “What I thought this class was supposed to be doesn’t match what I wind up doing.” There’s often a valid issue, but it’s not the issue the player thinks.
Fixing MMO’s is very simple. MMo’s are also virtual believable worlds; they are still videogames, but they’re supposed to make a fictional static world become real in every way. And i don’t mean simply use names and settings as a hype booster, but the whole world we’ve read in books and seen in films actually become REAL because of the time-progression that constitutes the persistancy of these games.
For example Star Trek Online isn’t sposed to be the average MMO with the usual clichés but with names and things that sound trekky, but the ACTUAL world of star trek that becomes alive in EVERYWAY.
0) Let people play with their friends
Not just the friends that happen to be about the same level, on the same server, on the same quests, in the same guild, with comparable gear, playing complementary classes, in the same zone, of the same real skill level.
Haha, god I lived through the Planes of Power in EQ1, even beat Quarm, god having to get 36 gamers all on the same page to take down the Rathe Council. I see why WoW started making their raids smaller, and the 5 man group, what a concept!
Excellent post, Scott, as usual.
One small thing I’d like to say about a comment.
It’s statements like this that always put me in a bit of a tizzy.. Where is it written that in order to be able to have a good design idea, you have to be able to code it?
Apparently Gary Gygax was one hell of a programmer.. I’ve seen quite a few D&D based video games, so you know he was all about the C++.
It’s one thing to have a sound baseline understanding of various technologies to know what is technically feasible. It’s quite another to completely reject a good idea because the person who came up with it can’t get the 1′s and 0′s to do their bidding. That’s why you have professional coders to do that sort of thing..
I’m in no way in the industry other than a consumer, but the way some people who are in the industry make it sound, to be on a development team you have to be able to create your own compiler and know assembly cold before you even think of putting pen to paper about YOUR idea.
UO was grindtastic?
You could get a 7xGM in less than 30 days without macroing. Try getting to the max level in WoW in 30 days. If it’s possible, you’ll be in pain near the end.
Consistent expectation is damn boring, definition of role is stereotyping (but also works with skill based systems, as a set of skills can define a class or an arche-type, group setups should only limit the ways of how something can be achieved but not set 2 healers, 2 hybrid, 3 DPS, 1 interrupter in stone!
“Classes create content, establish limits and simplify balancing” and skill based systems not? Void arguments, nothing to them. Skill based systems have usually limits too (maximum amount of skills, maximum value for skill, learning cost), balancing a 32 vs 32 class-based-system fight should be no easier or harder than balancing a 32 vs 32 skill-based-system fight. “Classes create content” must be one of Scott’s jokes, everyone can wear a mage hat or a heavy shield, the question is how proficient he is at it! Please elaborate.
Tried EVE Online. When you meet someone for the first time, then you don’t know how the character is skilled and what the ship he is in is capable of.
Characters in EVE have attributes, those affect skill learning speed. You can be specialized or mix professions like Trader, Industrialist, Combat Pilot through skills easily.
Someone should take Shadowrun’s (pen & paper RPG) system, take away the arche-type system and use the attributes and skills, edges and flaws and use karma (instead of experience) for enhancing skills and attributes and buying and leveling magical artefacts.
I despise the class FOTMism, the whole leveling-simulator idea, the 8-char-slots-MMOs where everybody runs a couple of accounts and has 8 twinks which are ready to be logged on for every purpose.
It’s mundane, I have a brain, I could try to achieve to be anything I want to, but obviously I can’t due to my limits, never will be an astronaut or a rocket scientist, but a charater in a game, in a virtual world, why should the character have such limits?
To me a player ideally would have more choices with a skill-based system than with a class-based system.
A game is a series of interesting choices. – Sid Meier
“Try getting to the max level in WoW in 30 days. If it’s possible, you’ll be in pain near the end.”
Really? My last char was 7 days played to 80, 25 days irl (working more than 40 hours a week). My friend who’s using recruit-a-friend is on pace for 4 days to 80. Just like UO, there’s a big difference between the casual, several month pace to max most people use and the min-max pace. I’d certainly say WoW has a much easier and more enjoyable (and marginally shorter) leveling pace than many other comparable games. It’s one of the reasons it blew up in the first place: because 1-60 in release felt *fun* and not grindy.
Good article. But you mentioned classes and levels. So this comment thread will be about classes and levels.
In the red corner: people who have made MMOs and know why we use classes and levels.
In the blue corner: people who have not, and think classes and levels were shat out by Satan himself.
FIGHT!
@isildur
Can you explain what the knowledge behind the people in the red corner is please?
Shouldn’t be there a green corner with people who have made MMOs without classes and levels (knowledgable or not
)?
Good to see some discussion springing from my post at Trembling Hand. We need to debate these points rather than resign ourselves to the derivative MMOs of today.
Couple of points though: ‘better AI’ doesn’t mean ‘harder’. I don’t know why this leap of logic keeps getting made. Heck, making the current mobs smarter could just mean not having them behave so predictably stupid. They can still be beatable, but they could at least give the illusion of smarts instead of standing around waiting for someone to cross their invisible ‘personal space’ barrier and aggro.
Classes, levels: think outside the box. An MMO doesn’t need to be based on D&D. It just doesn’t. An MMO is anything ‘massively multiplayer’. It could be a lobby for instanced battles that contribute to a larger strategic world. Then it could be more like Counter-Strike or Combat Mission. People don’t bemoan the lack of levels in those games. Or if you really want levels, make it like Mount&Blade – earn xp and gain levels as usual, and each level gives you points to spend on abilities, improving them incrementally. And mobs don’t ‘con’. (I never want to see grey mob that is trivial to me – that breaks my suspension of disbelief – unless it’s City of Heroes…) Sure, this system compresses the spectrum of abilities between level 1 and the level cap, but if that’s folded into the gameplay (as it is in Mount&Blade), then that can work.
And ‘encourage grouping’ sooo doesn’t mean ‘force grouping’. Encouraging grouping should be a bottom-up thing (incentives, extra xp, auto quest sharing, sidekicking etc) not top down (dungeon required 40 people to enter). Hey, have epic content, but for mainstream PvE, just make it a no brainer to group. Don’t explicitly penalise solo (except they don’t get the advantages of being in a complementary group).
And finally – not all MMOs should be the same. There really, really should be a diverse range of games available. Some like WoW, some like EVE, some like a lobby/instance, some PvP focused. Give us diversity, because MMO gamers are a broad church.
@Tim. I’ve been thinking about the OP throughout my working day and the thing I kept coming back to as the most troublesome was the point that players lie about wanting challenge. And I came to the same conclusion you did. That when players say they want more challenge, when they say that want smarter mobs, they don’t mean they want impossible fights. They mean they want mobs to act more intelligently.
What does intelligence mean, exactly? I think that one aspect of intelligence is situational awareness. The immediate response of every arrgoed mob should not be attack. Sometimes it means flee, sometimes it means run for help, sometimes it means attack. A smart monster does not have a one track mind; a smart monster does not employ the same tactic in every battle; a smart monster wants to live another day if it can.
Let me give an example of what I mean by situational awareness. I play WoW and in order to level up a profession as a level 60 player I had to go back to the starting area. I was honestly shocked that my level 60 could arrgo those low levels. And even more shocked that once picked up those monster would attack. It was mindless. Any smart monster, when faced with overwhelming odds against them, would flee; or would at least try to gather for a group attack. There simply was no situational awareness on the part of the mobs, and I thought that was and is very poor game design.
The second comment that I would make about challenge is that it needs to be purposeful. The more difficult the fight, the more meaning it must have in terms of game content. I’ll admit to avoiding certain difficult battles in WoW. It’s because those battles are difficult, yet winning them doesn’t reward me in any way. They just waste my time. I’m not interested in a hard battle of the sake of a hard battle. I need to understand how it fits withing the overall meaning of the game progression before I am willing to play it. Again, let me give an example from WoW. With in the game, the amount of XP given is based upon the level of the opposing monster. Yet in all situations that I have investigated, the XP per hour is always maximized by fighting monsters at or two levels below you. Fighting mobs three or four levels above you is more challenging and more fun, IMHO, but the game simply does not reward that behavior, unless you are being escorted through the game by a much higher level character. So it’s just not fair to claim that players lie about wanting challenge when the game does not reward them for taking challenges.
@isildur
By all means, do enlighten us. Because to me, the only reason that can possibly come to mind for levels is “treadmill” — forcing people to go to the maximum level so they can take part in the endgame, and for class, “replayability” for when you think you’ve ridden that treadmill as far as it would carry on without starting to sputter up smoke.
Both of these are probably high on the suits’ list, but as far as game designers are concerned, I don’t see why they themselves would be so attached to such obviously unpopular ideas.
I for one am tired of the fake sense of progression that is usually the result of levels (e.g. you can one-shot the guy ten levels below you and get one-shotted by one ten levels above), sometimes accompanied by a parallel grind for gear à la WoW.
And if I may get even more specific: I do remember that within a month of the release of Pirates of the Burning Sea, players were asking that only level-40+ players accept invitations to port battles, even in a nation that couldn’t afford to be so choosy because they didn’t have enough people (France). On one glorious occasion, the nation leaders apparently asked people of low levels to pass up on invitations, and the nation ended up getting trounced in the battle because it didn’t nearly have a full complement of 24 (something like 8 or 9, if I remember).
Yet how can you convince low-level people that they can serve in any meaningful fashion in an RvR game when you’re excluding them from port battles (or even any sort of group PvP) for being liabilities? And in the context of PotBS the players are *right* to do so because that’s how the game was designed, which means that at one point the question must be put to the developers whether this was an intended consequence of their design choices.
And in the case of PotBS, the uselessness of lowbies is glaring: Lowbies are a liability in PotBS because the best level-20 ships are massively outgunned by level-50 ships in three aspects: number of cannon, caliber, and range — and I’m not even getting into the armor differences between a level-20 and a level-50 ship (or indeed the skills to which a level-50 player has access to widen the discrepancy). In other words, in a port battle, a level-50 ship can pretty much sink a level-20 ship with a single broadside, long before the level-20 could even get in range to fire his guns (which would only make a dent anyway). This is just the nautical version of the one-shot in WoW, except that WoW doesn’t revolve around RvR or even PvP.
So the message of PotBS was, level to 50, or be useless. Fine for the usual powerlevelers, but not so fine for ordinary players who would take their time getting to level 50 — only to be told then to pass on port battle invitations in favour of people with more experience, i.e. those same powerlevelers who got to 50 within the first month. I myself only made it to 45 over the course of five months before I quit, and even my best ship (an Oliphant, level 44) wasn’t considered battle-worthy; the Heavy Oliphant was okay, but that was a level-50 ship…
So if you were to ask me what was the impact of having levels in PotBS, I would say it just led to the quick consolidation of the endgame (the port battles) within the hands of a few hardcore gamers who had the time to play and typically leveled up very quickly, and who then started dismissing slower players who had reached 50 but didn’t nearly have their experience in the port battles from which they had been discouraged from taking part because of their low level. The rest of the players were more or less told: “Go level to 50, do your PvE stuff, and mind the red circles (even when they cover half the map and you can’t get to some of the content without entering one) for there is no crying in there.”
Lowbies were useless in PvP and RvR. Perhaps many quit the game over that (not to mention the ganking) before they could get a taste of the endgame. So I would love to hear why people who make MMO’s use levels and classes.
@Vetarnias
And again EVE paves the way. (Caveat – I personally don’t enjoy EVE, but I do respect it tremendously as it serves its audience incredibly well – case in point, EVE is the highest selling Western MMO after WoW and possibly WAR).
In EVE, you can be capable in PvP at mid-level by specialising in one of the many roles – tackling, ECM, support etc rather than firepower.
Plus, the more skills you get opens up bigger ships, but those ships are slower and more vulnerable to smaller ships. Thus, mid-level players still have a role to play in combat against larger ships too.
Not that EVE is perfect, but it shows an alternative to the ‘con’ system and levels = better-in-every-way system.
Boy, I sure wish the lead designer of the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would show up and explain why people who make games use classes and levels.
I know this is on the levelling side again, but I have a new thing to venture which the OP didn’t state. The main reason people hate levels is the inherant grind to going from 1 -> whatever. I mean, for me just starting to play WoW, I’d have quit after an hour if not for the triple XP bonus. The one alteration to the system that I haven’t seen used outside of Guild Wars is one of the level cap. Level for a couple of hours (in the case of the two “chapters”) and you’ll hit max level and can use all content.
Of course, I can think of a reason why it’s not used very often -
bugger it…double post >_<.
as I was saying in #25, the only reason I can come up with is that having a very large level cap (that is game effecting) is that is spread your playerbase very thin. For example, if WoW were to have a level cap of say….30, then a larger percentage of the game would be open to players, which would stop players from milling together at quest hubs, which seems to be one of the ways WoW is trying to “Encourage grouping” so to speak. However, they’ve already got a built in answer for this – Trade channels are linked across a server…why not a general channel with a tag having an area name at the beggining of the message?
And excellent post btw. It’s good to see what others have picked up as being “wrong” with the industry.
PassingS
“Hey, I need to always kill the guy healing people. No, really. Screw you, taunt skill. I’M KILLING THIS GUY. Oh, I’m getting some friends to help. In fact we’re going to loop around from behind to take them by surprise. AND WE’RE NOT STOPPING TILL WE WIN.”
That sounds an awful lot like PVP.
It’s also the primary reason why I enjoyed playing healers in DAoC’s RvR but couldn’t stand PvE with them.
Well, I’m in agreement with most of it – save the launch when ready response you gave, Scott.
It’s interesting as I’m certain you’ve argued the other side of the fence pre-MMO worker type person days. I’m sure at some point you’ve said that customers have to, essentially, stop paying into crap to “test” products that clearly weren’t ready. But, as we learn and grow and change our perspectives change… or, maybe it was some other blog!
But I digress. Launch when it’s ready… I guess we can lower our standards and say launch when it’s playable… maybe?
You said this (wish I knew how to quote):
But yes, in an ideal world we’d be free of budgetary pressures and, through beneficent overlords careless with cash, or even more unlikely, proper and experienced project management, a game would be developed well, QA’d throughly, beta’d for both fun gameplay and crippling bugs, and release on time and on budget.
I think this is a poor view to take and excuses bad design/testing/behaviour/whatever on the releasing company’s part.
It’s neither fair nor reasonable to say… yes we are running out of cash so let’s throw this out there, have people pay us to try and get it playable, and then maybe we’ll have something! How is this only being realized when the company is running out of cash?
Unacceptable. Everyone’s favourite example is likely Vanguard or Hellgate or both. Vanguard launched beyond broken and it was inexcusable to dump that crap on the market despite whatever budgetary pressures the company may have had. Should they loose it all, go bankrupt etc.? Well – yeah. I guess so. I mean, it’s not a charity, right? It’s a business selling a product. The product sucked. They sold it anyway KNOWING that is sucked. Therefore they suck. But you’re justifying that behaviour because making good products is hard.
I think companies do need to fail so the message will be loud and clear. If we make crappy products, our business won’t survive.
But we’ll all be duped by the hype (glares at the $100+ collector’s edition of Vanguard buried in his closet), buy into it, be disappointed and repeat the cycle again. Then we’ll get Trembling Hand type posts telling the biz how to fix it, your responses saying fixing it is hard (not possible?) and then round and round we go again!
We’re all so predictable.
I’ve got a pretty simple philosophy on fixing MMORPGs.
Treat them like any other game. A game without any special qualification that comes with being a fabulous massively multiplayer spectacle. That there’s more than one player involved, or thousands of players involved, is just another piece to consider in the design. The goal, as always: generate fun.
This is probably why, when an experienced development team which has never made a MMORPG before tries their hand at it, the results have been good. Square-Enix and Final Fantasy XI. Blizzard and World of Warcraft. You may not like those games, but look at the mmogchart on either, and the player retention on both has been unusually good.
Something like EVE Online strikes is an entirely different tangent, and that’s interesting. The game can be pretty dull to play, but if the [i]drama[/i] is exciting, that’s an acceptable substitute.
Another thought I just had to share:
A “drama-centric” MMORPGs are to games as reality television is to other television shows. It’s not so much the quality of the entertainment that matters anymore, the actors aren’t even actors, it’s just watching the resulting spectacle of forcing normal Janes and Joes into an improbable situation that matters.
I never enjoyed Lineage or Lineage 2, but the population on both games has been exceptional. However, what’s the end game? Same thing as EVE Online: massive PvP fests with territorial loss. They’re just another reality TV MMORPG.
The Chinese model of “The9″ where you buy time cards and only pay for the actual time you play is a pretty solid pay-to-play setup. Considering then you stop all whining about downtime and maintenance (not that you should launch with much downtime anyways).
Free will never work for an (successful)MMO – too many post-launch support employees that need to be paid.
1) Make the worlds more engaging – “And a lot of that is due to the unoriginal design of many games tasked with “cloning WoW”. It’s really hard to make a coherent world when you’re working off a xerox machine of game mechanics and interfaces.”
I disagree to a point – too many games in development are wasting too much of their design time on UI “originality” – instead of focusing on PvE/PvP/Progression immersion. Honestly, why do companies try recreating the wheel just to be different? WoW did a good job on a minimal UI with a wide range of customization options…
Game developers should take advantage of this and duplicate their UI – putting customers at a certain comfort level immediately upon starting the game… and also save money in development “duplicate their UI, then throw everything into storyline/graphics/PvE etc..”
Everyone keeps mentioning WoW – but I never see any mention of market availability. Over 40% of WoW’s playerbase comes from the Asian market -Blizzard did something like a 1-2 month development tour of Asia during development simply to customize certain graphics to attract Asian players.. all other new MMO’s seem to have horse blinders on and ignore the largest gaming addict market on the planet.
So – if you consider only about 5-6 million players come from the U.S./Euro markets for WoW (after 4 years).. when games like AoC and Warhammer launch with approx. 750k players in their first month… they aren’t doing that bad (for the record I play neither).
I’m babbling now… end.
7 days of /played over 25 days is almost 7 hours per day, every day. 7 hours of playing for most people isn’t enjoyable one day a week, much less every day of the week for 3.5 weeks. So I’m going to have to agree that getting to max level in wow in 30 days is a real pain. Doable, yes, but not something for the faint of heart.
That said, I’m currently leveling a warrior. He’s at level 68 with 5 days 2 hours /played, without RaF, and I would guess 10 to 15 hours of that is standing around while I’m afk making dinner or walking the dog. I’ve been working on him since December 20th or so. Not 0-to-80-in-30-days, but still a very enjoyable pace imho.
That model works well for the asian market and some very specific Western ones (Greece and Spain for example) but isn’t so great for other Western markets.
The reason is to do with the way that the average gamer in those territories plays games. In China and Korea, a lot of online gaming happens in cyber cafés and so the players log in with at the same time as their friends having already organised themselves for the play session out of game. Whereas most Western gamers play at home on our own PCs and hook up with our friends once we’re connected.
You know how annoying it is when your party has to sit around waiting because the healer has to go and feed the kids in the middle of a raid or the tank needs to let the dog out RIGHT NOW? Now imagine that it’s not just wasting time but costing you money when they do that.
Am I the only one who finds it interesting that many of the regular “solutions”/”complaints” about MMO’s are effectively to turn them into/exasperate that they’re not FPS multiplayer?
Because lord knows there’s not enough of those out there already…
Howdy Lum, this is Thunderlips from the days of yor and I will throw in my two cents as a long time MMO player. Being an ‘MMO player’ I have the distinct advantage of being the customer rather than the developer. So, honestly I think I have an edge up any developers when they ask silly things like ‘what makes MMOs better’.
>> 10) Launch when it’s finished
This is a symptom of overly ambitious projects, not a problem from the get-go. Obviously if you do something of a limited scale and do it very well, it will fly better than a everything-including-the-kitchen-sink but buggy as hell rushed POS. Design it with scalability paramount and add the significant growth as you go – IE, spiral development method that never ends.
>> 8 ) Make subscriptions cheaper
You see Lum, we are not 3rd worlders who have to eat dirt cakes to fill our bellies. We are a consumer nation and it delineates us from the muck-dwellers. It makes us feel good to pay too much for a product – look at fucking Starbucks. Why the price has stayed the same since UO I can not fathom. The only real trick here is to not raise the price after it has been set.
>> 7) Quality of life
>> 4) Don’t make me grind
Wrong wrong wrong. Many people like to grind. I find it therepudic to mine (same in UO). I could do that shit for hours. I like seeing my little pieces of rock get larger. Yes I know it is hardly efficient but I like it. You guys assumes far far too much. The real trick here is simply to offer as many styles of play as possible, and give them all some merit.
>> 3) Make combat smarter
This depends on the player and I don’t really figure this is terribly true. People like responsiveness more than anything else. The actual system is relatively moot as long as it is competent.
>> 1) Make the worlds more engaging
This should be retitled ‘familiar but engaging’
>> 2) Ditch classes and levels
Eh, more classes and more levels. One of the few things EQ2 got right me thinks. a) they are familiar which should never be underestimated, b) anything that separated my godly asshat of the whale from some nub is grand, c) the first game to have 50 races and 1000 levels will be pure win.
>> 5) Make mobs smarter
Holy crap I agree with you for a change. Unless I’m stomping things making their intestines shoot out of their nose as I loot their last worldly goods, I am not happy. The trick here is the illusion of challenge.
>> 6) Encourage grouping
Eh, as above, accommodate different game play while making them all have some merits.
>> 9) Listen to, and engage with, players
That’s what you hire the third world much dwellers to do.
Pretty much everything I see in World of Warcraft has been influenced by the past:
More challenges? Great! Lets set up dungeons that people can crawl through. With reasonably smart monsters, who do things like run and get their friends. Its super great exp, the loot is much better and then 30 minutes into the dungeon, a runner gets away and POOF! Everyone is dead on a killer corpse run (back when “I died” was the worse thing I could tell my wife at 11:00pm when that meant I’d be another hour, minimum). Group is over, and people grump that grinding away on the surface on non-running monsters is a better use of their time.
If I really want some EPIC loot, how about I sit in one place for a few weeks… straight. Then once its over, time for a raid or 3 of 70 of my closest friends. At least the ones who have the entire weekend blocked off (okay maybe a few hours of sleep too). MAN! We are l33t. Not like those losers who can’t hack this game.
Okay, okay. None of this grouping only stuff. Lets put a mix of group and solo content. Nerf the death penalty so only the Grim Reaper is complaining. Group stuff mostly instanced, except for a very small number of outdoor non-instanced content. All we need now is a tank… oh wait the healer left… CC sucks, we need another… Man, group dynamics SUCKS! I’m soloing and leaving these stupid group areas empty. Or at least wait until they make all outdoor content soloable. Or I can beg a friend or bribe a stranger to run me through with no challenge so I can get this darn quest out of my log, don’t have to worry about dying so I can get a quest reward I’ll replace in 5 levels (which is when? Day after tomorrow?).
Lets make the game more engaging. But this DPS can solo as a tank I can’t. Or that tank can get a group in a second but as DPS I have to wait hours, might as well solo. Ah, finally its balanced… in PvE. Well mostly. Now that I’m 10% behind in DPS, no one will choose me for this raid. Or PvP. Or anything. Time to reroll and grind my way through it all again. I wish I could level faster. And have more quests. YAY! thousands upon thousands of quests… but these quest tell NO story (even though some do). And I can’t affect the world… THAT game allows their players to affect the world. They built that beautiful town together… oh and someone came in the middle of the night when no one was on and destroyed 2 months worth of work. Daaaamn!
I wish someone would take ALL of that into consideration and balance it all perfect. THAT’S a game I would play!
Meanwhile… in the board room: “How much money we make this month? Really? Hey tell those developers to get the lead out and make the game so its more like what 80% of the people do.”
Taunt exists to fill in the blank for where collision dection could/should/will be in the “future”. Once healers can actually hide behind the tank, mobs will permitted to be smarter.
No.
Taunt is in no way a design substitute for CD. Imagine a mob that wants to eat your healer (because that’s the smart thing to do right?), he can’t get to your healer because Burly McTank and his identical twin brother are blocking his way. So he froths and rails as he tries to scrabble over the tank wall to get to the healer. Meanwhile the McTank brothers and their good friend Seamus O’Stabby are turning him into dogfood without taking any damage in return. So to make the encounter challenging, we tell the monster to put aside his death feud with the healer after a while and concentrate on the guys who are stopping him from getting there.
Ooh look it’s a taunt system by any other name!
Seems as if you just said “No” and then agreed with him.
@Iconic
Not really, it’s still the exact same aggro management systems which are seen in pretty much every game.
Monster picks a target based on what the biggest threat is (with healing usually being given a greater weight than DPS)
Monster zeroes in on the highest aggro
Tanks need to move aggro from the squishy healer to themselves
Simply blocking the mob isn’t a good design solution as that then leads to zero risk encounters. The important thing is aggro movement and currently this is done by the players directly (through taunts/detaunts) as well as by switches in the AI (IF can’t reach target THEN move to next aggro magnet in list).
It’s not a quantum leap, it’s what already happens.
To be clearer, collision detection (or lack of it) is not the reason that monsters and aggro systems work the way they do.
I posted a response and it seemed to go into the ether.
Anyway, it seems as if slackjaw is talking about the “taunt” mechanic whereby mobs are artificially forced to attack a target that is not the most logical target.
And he says “well, if/when collision detection exists in a really feasible way, then the taunt mechanic can go away.”
And then you say “No” and then go on to give a paint by numbers example of EXACTLY what slackjaw was saying (or at least the way I interpreted it).
So maybe we’re all disagreeing on what “taunt” is referring to or something?
I was mostly taking issue with the assumption that if only CD was implemented then monsters would be more intelligent. Taunts aren’t really the issue, purely a symptom of what Slackjaw was actually talking about.
Technically – right now you are paying for the time that you sleep, work, eat, or whenever you aren’t even logged into the game. I actually live in China (not Chinese)- and yes, internet cafe’s are popular (they are more like dirty slave dungeons). If you walk around most of them though, it’s typically starcraft or other games. Alot of the WoW community here plays from home (not to say you don’t see WoW at all in the cafe’s).
← Previous Comments
{ 9 trackbacks }