On “Ditching classes and levels.”

Classes can be ditched, levels are always going to exist in some form, whether you call them that or not.

I think what many people crave is escape from the same linear crap where every player of Class X and level Y has access to the exact same everything. Yes, it’s easier to balance, but the laziness and “can’t be done” attitude on this front is amazing.

At the very least there is a lot of room to allow custom class design and overlap, like the old class system in Star Wars Galaxies. There was an awful lot of structure in the way that you had to progress, but there was also a fair amount of freedom to combine bits of different professions together. A more open system than the old SWG system would be a lot of work, but would also offer a lot more fun to jaded MMO players.

DDO is a less-than-successful game because of the basically-forced grouping. The combat system was decent when I was beta testing it. I’m not willing to beg for a party so I can have a night of gameplay though.

As has been mentioned, UO got away with FFA PvP when it was the only game in town. EQ got away with forced grouping when it was (almost) the only game in town.

Neither of those things is true, and despite the protests of the D&D loyalists (and children, I was playing D&D before the Blue Box basic set came out. I still have boxed sets of Gamma World and Boot Hill), DDO is not pen and paper D&D. It’s an MMO, a business that needs to attract customers.

If you want to enforce groups, play fucking Pen and Paper D&D and house rule your ass off. Stop trying to drive away income (I mean solo players) because you think everyone needs to respect your authoritah.

I just about wrote a book in your comment box, but before I submitted it, I realized I can use this stuff to make a new post on my OWN blog, and screw your comments.

But I agree with all of your points, so there’s that.

Eric Heimburg :
But I agree with all of your points, so there’s that.

And really, isn’t that what’s important here?

I never thought I’d say thank goodness for WoW; I don’t care for it and don’t play it. But as long as it keeps #4 & #7 [the Blizzard Rule] in play then….thank goodness for WoW. Unlike the rest of life, designing games is Hard. They have Executives that want to actually make money; timelines and these budget things. It’s not their fault they dump half-finished product out the door.

I hope the Blizzard Rule stays in place a nice long time.

So delaying launch until the game is “finished” would drive the company out of business, but launching before the game is finished will result in players coming, deciding that it fails the Blizzard rule due to its unfinished state, and leaving the game with, for the sake of argument, 60% of the number of subscribers Marc Jacobs wanted.

Guess we should all get used to waiting two years a pop for the next WoW expansion, because those rules seem to say that we’re not seeing a viable contender to the throne until Blizzard releases one itself.

I didnt play WOW classic, but I imagined that it took people a lot longer to get from 1-60 than it did people to get to 1-40 in Warhammer.

I wonder if making a huge grind before people get to end game is a good idea to stall your player base before you can get the end game stuff completed.

How do you keep finding all these terrible, terrible blogs?

It’s nice that you can come in and correct their awfulness, but I almost prefer to pretend they don’t exist.

On that “Make mobs smarter” point in the original blog, can people stop crafting awesome stories of NPC AI (or, for that matter, PvP encounters) of how things went X, Y and Z and then they won?

Taking HL as their example, I often saw random things of X, Y and Z then died. Quick load, died again. Quick load, let’s try this … dead. Quick load, let’s throw a grenade there then pull back and yay, made it. In single player FPSs I can fiddle around with tactics until I win. MMOs don’t have quick load buttons. If players want random, unpredictable encounters, they should be prepared to die a lot.

Oh, and CoH/V has items, but they are called enhancements. They are loot by any other name.

Final point: ChampO has ditched classes and theoretically you can pick any powers you want. We’ll have to see what that means for players and character advancement when it launches.

And, that. I believe. Is the best way to end the blogosphere chain of 10 things.

I have nothing to say aside from YAY angry johnny is still in business (haven’t thought about them since freshman year of college).

The list sounds intimidating, my theory is that random people could make better MMOs than out there with the amount of money Age of Conan or Warhammer have used for development.

10) Either launch when finished or make the development itself an open process. In any case, the project and budget management and is really laughable sometimes in the industry: No one will prove to me that patches (development, testing and applying them to a live product) each week or each two weeks can work for a MMO (AoC tried that). Sofware quality can be measured as: being on time, being in budget and the amount of errors in. The fact is that besides of seeking a balance in that magical triangle, the games often have a bad design making one way of playing the path most will choose!

8) Beta software shouldn’t cost 15 Euros per month.

3) & 5) Simple combat and griding are okay to a degree: but you have to make sure that there are many (simple) ways of fighting and many ways of griding (through PvE, PvP, market game, political game, etc.)

6) I wouldn’t encourage grouping, in fact I’d remove groups, parties, war bands and so on. Grouping would come then with a higher communication cost and could lead to a communication break down. Yes, beating the crap out of the zerg with a small group of dedicated people is fun, but spread healing from a safe position and watching health bars in group window go up and down isn’t! In many games one can just play the game by foccusing on the damn health bars and not on what’s going on. I’d remove the health bars too, one would have to beat on someone for as long as it takes.

2) Classes and levels are totally obsolete, you can drive a game with an attribute and skill based system easily. See Shadowrun, the pen & paper RPG (minus the arche types).

9) Sell your vision and invite everyone to take part in it and make it better, just don’t bullshit people with features you will not deliver and try to be innovative.

Best quote of 2009: “Game design, in many ways, is convincing players that they won a struggle against imposing odds. It does not mean actually creating imposing odds.”

Its hard to believe these guys have ever played games before, much less have advanced degrees. Its clear they’ve never worked in the industry before and if they were to get jobs in the industry, they’d probably make the same craptacular mistakes that Koster did with UO and McQuaid did with EQ. This sentence though was most telling:

“Let me change my name. Let me change my appearance as often as I like. Don’t restrict me doing these things unless you have a very good reason.”

OMG are you kidding? Did you learn nothing from the griefing that went on in UO and I/LoK and these features weren’t even available!

But above and beyond that, their comments just seem whacked and without thought. They have some good points. I don’t know anyone who loves the levelling grind. But its hardly why MMOs are broken. Comparing the combat systems of MMOs with those of single player FPS games, again, does not make an MMO broken. But yah the same old combat process gets old and tired after a while. As you pointed out in your rant, they don’t have a clue about the business of MMOs and not even Microsoft — a company with more money than god — ships software when its ‘finished.’ Near as I can tell any piece of software is pretty much a work in progress and is never “finished.”

Gah I’m going to rant myself because these guys are so far off the mark and so wrong and their rant is so thoughtless and stupid it pisses me off. Don’t listen to them Lum. They are WRONG. and making games is HARD.

The “how to fix MMOs” game seems really fun to me, I want to play.

Step 1: how to fix the “3 boring classes” problem. Because it sounds like this is a big and difficult one somehow. Keep classes, they are a great solution to multiple problems (knowing who does what at a glance is one that wasn’t even mentioned, as well as all the ones in the main article here).

Here’s my answer: Take out the “damage” role, everyone should be damaging. Give every class roughly equal damage. Take out the “tank” role, make the MBIs do area damage, they hit everyone fighting them the same amount. Keep healing, it just becomes different to do. Add a role of “defense” and a role of “offense” – the defense role makes MBIs hit softer, or miss a lot, or something like that, whether by adding a shield or by cursing the MBI or covering it in gluey stuff or whatever. The offense role makes the MBI die faster by making everyone do more damage, or swing faster, or hit more often, or making the MBI heal itself slower, or something. The variety in defense/offense classes is usually whether it works by “buff” or “debuff” but you can squeeze more variety in there too. So pretty much, defense replaces tanks and offense replaces damage, but, they’re much more interesting to play because everyone gets to do equal damage. On a team, the offense makes everyone hit harder, not just himself. The defense makes everyone safer, not just himself.

Not only that, but when you do it this way, you can balance it so that it doesn’t matter which you have more of, healing, offense, or defense. They are pretty much substitutes for each other. Offense makes you kill things faster, so you might need to make other disadvantages for having too much offense, but the risk of offense is random numbers; offense makes it faster but it also makes it riskier and the slowdown there is the times you die

You probably already have MBIs that are intended for one player and other MBIs that are intended for multiple only. I’ll call them SMBIs (solo mbis) and GMBIs (group mbis). Solo MBIs can be killed by at least one of the new 3 roles. Group MBIs need at least one of each, and then add any number of whichever else.

City of Villains pretty much has the above scheme, but the MBIs are much weaker there overall. I think it could still work for a game with MBIs as tough as the Everquest ones, with the above suggestion.

Step 2 EZ socialization

But the one thing that most MMOs need to be “fixed” is very simple, they need a way for players of different levels and playing times to join up and do something meaningful together, without it being a way of cheating and having the player lower on the ladder getting a “rung up” so to speak. Having a mentoring system that temporarily boosts the lower one up to the higher one’s level, but does not provide them any faster of an advancement, is all that’s necessary, but making that happen technically seems to be fairly difficult and/or omitted for some other reason.

As for encouraging grouping, that is also doable without becoming Everquest. You just have to “encourage” it. But I pretty much think most MMOs already do this, so it’s not really a how to fix them thing. Maybe WoW does not encourage grouping at lower levels (mostly in my new-to-WoW feeling by making it very confusing to figure out how quests work when you’re in a group), but most MMOs do. And WoW encourages it at middle and higher levels, with their multi person instances.

Hear hear! Burn all armchairs. Or at least fit them with really painful, remote-controlled pointy spring-loaded things.

Ow.

Few other thoughts.

1) Start small, iterate often. Don’t use a 10 year single release development model, this is a sure recipe for failure. Concentrate on the core first, and release something playable and fun with a limited feature set within, say, 3 years. Add crafting, diplomacy, city sieges, or funky new feature #46 in later iterations.

2) Add jumping. Your users will complain if they can’t jump. Don’t know why, really. But some people will be put off enough to quit playing if its not there.

3) Add emotes, and not just text emotes. Dancing is a big one, but burping, farting, sitting, and laying down are all very popular.

4) Allow male and female versions of all of your classes. Some folks will refuse to play a female only character (I imagine the reverse is true to some extent as well).

5) Balance the classes (or skills) ARITHMETICALLY. 1 point damage = 1 point healing = 1 point crowd control, create an Excel spreadsheet and make sure each class (or skill) balances out to within .1 of a point to each other, and publish this sheet and let all of your users examine/critique it.

6) DON’T publish class descriptions years ahead of time because your customers will hold you to them like a binding contract forever. “Master of spell damage HA!!!!”

7) Accommodate different playing types within your game. Let the Griefers grief each other in a griefing zone, let the rogues pickpocket each other in a Thieves area, PvP area’s etc. Make a zone where magic is stronger, another where melee is stronger, another for ranged. Then put in some juicy quests for the other classes to get some phat loot.

8) Don’t make “Godlike Super Items” where 1 item is clearly the most superior in every aspect as your customers will ignore all other items. Make a superior melee armor, superior ranged armour, elemental armor, stats armor and force your users to pick and choose. Add weight restrictions so they can’t simple carry around all the armor sets and switch to the ones needed.

9) Design your content as a binary tree, with lower levels having fewer choices and higher levels having more. So if you are making low/medium/high level dungeons, make it 2/2/8, not 4/4/2.

10) Items that are harder to obtain should have more visual bonuses that statistical. The 100 hour quest sword should result in a flaming sword that looks cool as opposed to the sword of zonewide butt raping +1000 to everything. Make the game a little more casual friendly.

My concerns with classes are that they are built to function best in groups, and that they introduce PvP imbalance. I don’t particularly want to play in a group all the time, and paper/rock/scissors PvP is frustrating and far less skill-intensive than it should be.

Atlantica Online dodges this to some degree by allowing players to control a squad of units, rather than a single unit. Each unit is very constrained in its “class”, but because the player controls more than one constrained unit, it’s possible to build a much more robust “player presence” in combat.

Re 5: People keep complaining that it’s silly when one group of goblins stands 20 feet away watching you kill thier siblings in a different group of goblins. To solve this, you’d need to have that other group of goblins outside the range of character visibility, which is pretty darn far in most games. Or your entire gameplay would revolve around aoe’ing 10,0000 goblins as each group chains another group who all necessarily hit like baby murlocs.

You would either have to have very barren, empty worlds, where each reasonably dangerous mob is separated from any other reasonably dangerous mob by the player’s maximum visual distance, or you’d have to have worlds where the player is truly an epic hero capable of surviving 10′s of monsters (hello, wotlk). If you had large, barren worlds, people would be complaining even more about how long it takes to go from z to x, and how camped each place is. It’s just not realistic.

Re 2 – I’m sorry, but I loved — LOVED — UO’s classless and leveless system. Yes, in the end it’s just a different “skin” on the actual game system behind it, and it’s much much more complicated to balance since you can’t be ensured that the frost mage skills won’t be mixed with the ret pally skills, but it was also much more interesting as a player and much more engaging. I know alot of folks ended up having the flavor of the month build, but I stil loved it.

I got mentally exhausted reading over this because (while I’ve known these problems exist), it really put me into the shoes of an MMO dev. Why do you people WANT these jobs?! I’d spend five minutes trying to resolve these problems, then say “Screw it” and go make an FPS action game. Those involve much fewer paradoxes!

A lot of these I agree with your comments on. I do think your comment on ‘encouraging grouping’ was a bit short. Of course you can take it too far and there should be useful solo content, but by the same token I find it hard to get into ‘MMOs’ where everyone is just running around doing their own thing. I can get better content from a single player game with no subscription fee if I’m not interacting with others.

But, without levels I wouldn’t be able to say “Ding! 80!” in guild chat. Where’s the fun in that?