I'm tired of game companies and developers trying to deceive me into keeping my subscription for longer because desirable gear only drops every 1,000-5,000 mob kills, or requires a large raid just to get 1 or 2 pieces of worthwhile gear, that will go to less than 2% of the party who helped get It.

I'll admit that the absolute best ''God'' gear should be rare and hard to acquire, but everything in between should be obtainable no matter what kind of gamer you are, It's simply cheap game design to make it the other way around. Gear and loot should be their to enhance your own personality and individuality as a player, It should not determine the total worth of you as a player.

Let me clarify this, It is not very fun, or at least after the first couple MMORPG's you played, It no longer becomes very fun. It does not make you a better player, or make the game ''hard'' when you have these artificial time stretches for medium to high gear.

I would like to see developers make a game where the game is so fun, enjoyable, immersive, and adventurous that It is enough alone to keep you coming back to keep playing and staying subscribed, and not for some synthetic piece of gear, so you can run around feeling holier than thou in-game.

Gear is an important aspect of RPG's and this genre especially, but I'll say It once and I'll say It again, gear should be their to enhance the players own personality and individuality as a player, not determine the total worth of you as a player.

Thank you for your time.

Your thoughts, comments, and ideas are appreciated.

Games that focus heavily on crafting tend to do this.   You get the meterials to make make an item every 5 or 6th kill.   (plenty of exceptions).

Originally posted by NeverLand7

I would like to see developers make a game where the game is so fun, enjoyable, immersive, and adventurous that It is enough alone to keep you coming back to keep playing and staying subscribed, and not for some synthetic piece of gear, so you can run around feeling holier than thou in-game.

Gear is an important aspect of RPG's and this genre especially, but I'll say It once and I'll say It again, gear should be their to enhance the players own personality and individuality as a player, not determine the total worth of you as a player.

Thank you for your time.



 

But gear is not the only thing that keeps people coming back.  Its just one piece and its a piece people really need.  Eventually fun runs out, because new things to do run out as well.  After theres nothing else new to do, you need a carrot.  WIthout the carrot, people quit.  Its just the way it is.  IN a hypothetical world, you'd never run out of new content, but thats just not the real world=)

Originally posted by NeverLand7 

Did you mean that gear should drop more frequently off random mobs, or that named mobs should drop the totality of their loot table each time they are killed?

Gear-grind is the carrot that makes PvE-grinder have plenty of customers willing to pay to better their statistics, don't expect things to get better anytime soon.

It's not as simple as adding more loot.  Let's say you farm a raid 2 months and get 10 pieces of loot.  Quite infrequent.

So let's increase how frequent players are expected to get loot.  Now you get 20 pieces of loot in 2 months.   The loot itself will fall somewhere between these two extremes:

• Each upgrade is extremely small.
• Each upgrade is quite significant.

Problem with small upgrades is you're taking items where you're already getting like +0.5% crit chance, and spiltting that to each upgrade giving +0.25%.  Eventually things start to get ridiculously trivial (many players consider even 0.5% to be laughably small.)

Problem with significant upgrades is it significantly raises the maximum power characters can attain.  As the difference between a "Fresh 80" and a "Ultra-Veteran 80" increases, the community becomes more segmented.  Also gear becomes significantly more important for PVP (and too much of this ruins PVP.)  Also balancing the difficulty of PVE fights becomes a lot harder as power disparity increases.

None of these are absolute reasons not to increase loot frequency.  The point here is that gains in fun (looting more items) will incur increasing costs in these problems, and at a certain point it's not worth it. 

 You need to only look at Mass Effect's loot system to understand how sh1tty LOTS of loot thats just slightly better than the next is.  You get 1 gun, then in the next area you get another gun thats just a little better, than 10 minutes later you find 3 more guns that are all slightly different but equally useless in actually determining if you're any better.  It was retarded and got extremely tedious.   Theres a reason fans told them to totally scrap it all for the sequel.  

For loot to matter and it has to matter;)  You can't dole it out constantly with tiny incremental changes.  People eventually stop giving a crap, which makes the entire loot system a total waste of time.

I agree with the above posters.

If the loot becomes to abundant, it ceases to have meaning.

Go play City of Heroes. No "phat lewts"... no equipment. I see your toon is from Everquest. You no longer have to be in "their world", friend... EQ is a bad benchmark for the MMO environment to be judged off of.

There is also DDO... which I've recently tried again since its release. Gear is a factor... but it's not the 100% deciding factor of the game, like EQ or WoW.

Originally posted by NeverLand7

I'm tired of game companies and developers trying to deceive me into keeping my subscription for longer because desirable gear only drops every 1,000-5,000 mob kills, or requires a large raid just to get 1 or 2 pieces of worthwhile gear, that will go to less than 2% of the party who helped get It.

Then play something else other than gear-centric raid MMOs?

Originally posted by Nightbringe1

I agree with the above posters.

If the loot becomes to abundant, it ceases to have meaning.

In static loot systems, certainly.

MMOs with dynamic loot and mutliple uses for the loot can have their loot "flow like wine" to the players and still retain value and meaning.

Loot should not be the driving force. These carrot-on-a-stick raiding MMOs are tiresome when you get the endgame. There should be no such thing. In addition, wolves should not drop shoes. Wolves should drop leather, or teeth, or something that can be used to create something. All decent gear should be crafted. An addition serious problem of gear-centric games is that to keep people interested, over time, the gear because ridiculously powerful, and then player skill and player skills lose meaning when compared to the gear.

If gear were crafted and lost durability over time, to the point that it would have to be replaced at some point, crafting suddenly has serious meaning, and harvesting from monsters suddenly has meaning. That is a key to a sandbox though, I think theme-park people like other things.

Originally posted by Josher

 You need to only look at Mass Effect's loot system to understand how sh1tty LOTS of loot thats just slightly better than the next is.  You get 1 gun, then in the next area you get another gun thats just a little better, than 10 minutes later you find 3 more guns that are all slightly different but equally useless in actually determining if you're any better.  It was retarded and got extremely tedious.   Theres a reason fans told them to totally scrap it all for the sequel.  

For loot to matter and it has to matter;)  You can't dole it out constantly with tiny incremental changes.  People eventually stop giving a crap, which makes the entire loot system a total waste of time.

That sounds like more of a problem of poor gear design as oppose to frequent drops.

I believe frequent drops can work quite excellently if the gears visual style is interesting and unique enough with each piece and the items have character and creativity, Discworld for PSX anyone? :)

I think your looking for a game where building a player character is the primary purpose and equiping your character is simply to make your build style play out more smoothly.

I agree, that would be ultimate, however, I think a far more complicated character build is required then the traditional MMORPG comming out today.  players might even risk building there character real poorly to the point where it just wont function effectivly, which im not opposed to.

The only way I can think of to make a player feel like his character is more his own than just another one of the same thing is to make the character strength to monster strength grossly unbalanced.  So that would mean a hack and slash rpg or the exact opposite which would be more like "it has a zillion hit points, but that doesn't matter because I am perfectly capable survivalist".  which I guess would be called something like a "systematic slash" game.  I would consider a game like wow to be placed somewhere in between a hack and slash and my conceived "systematic slash" like game.  Forgive me if there is an actual gamer term for the antonym of hack and slash, but i couldn't find one.

This is just an idea...

Anyways, I dont see a MMORPG being capable of being a open world hack and slash, But I do think it could work for the opposite of that, because you wouldnt need a ludacris spawn rate to make sure there's enough for everyone.  So players could just build there characters around surviving in various ways based on whats appealing to them.

Basically what i'm invisioning is different survival tactics, like knockback, trip them, confusing, stuns, snares, summons, fears, shield, lifesteal, debuffs, mana shields, heals, mitigation skills, vanishing, blindness, roots, teleport and more, to keep fast running, punching to hard gorilla from stomping all over my genitalia before I can stomp all over his.  Its a very capable player character that specialzes in receiving as little damage as possible.

Yep the game sucks you in because at the start it is fun and the loot flows, then before you know it you're grinding out raid after countless raid to get that bit of loot, that last bit in the set. It's crazy how some MMOs can suck you in, keep you playing even though you aren't really having fun.

It's a pretty damn good way to retain players, albeit a cruel one.

Originally posted by Bigdavo

Yep the game sucks you in because at the start it is fun and the loot flows, then before you know it you're grinding out raid after countless raid to get that bit of loot, that last bit in the set. It's crazy how some MMOs can suck you in, keep you playing even though you aren't really having fun.

It's a pretty damn good way to retain players, albeit a cruel one.

Aye. The first time you play MMORPG's and for quite a bit after that, you don't really question the game design, graphics style etc, you just accept what is being put out there on your plate, and eat It like a hungry dog. But once you take a step back from constant playing and no thinking, and really take a deep look at the whole of the game design for all these MMORPG's, there is many controversial aspects of the aforesaid game design and all that follows It.

I think this Illusion of MMORPG's players and their thinking in regards to ''My dad can beat up your dad'' with gear grinding and level grinding, and who's more maxed out, and who has better raid gear and min/maxing builds, is to a degree a stumbling block of this genre and many of the players who populate these game worlds. It holds the genre back from becoming more fun, adventurous and having more enchanted and mystical worlds.

I've said this in other threads before, and I'll say It again, there should be no such thing as a gimp. We need to redefine the gimp. If choosing abilities, skills, stats etc based on your personal taste and interests makes your character weaker and not feasible in relation to min/maxing, FoTM and ''preferred builds''. Well then that just shows you that this genre has some skeletons in It's closet that need some cleaning up.

 Evolution takes a "bit"...

The first "mainstream" MMO was Ultima Online, released in 1997. So what... 12 years later... we have what we got today. Pretty damned diverse if you look at the amount of MMO's, mainstream or otherwise, up for grabs.

Comparatively, I started playing an Atari 2600 around 1981... so 12 years later... I was playing Mechwarrior 1 or Wolfenstein 3-D on my 386DX-40, or playing the new badass game Mortal Kombat that had just come out for the SNES.

Compared to now, stuff was pretty archaic.

Point is... Things are still evolving and progressing. Call of Duty: World at War "could" be said to be a "clone" of Wolfenstein 3-D, or people can say that World of Warcraft is a clone of EQ... or Aion is a clone of World of Warcraft... on and on... but there's a significant evolution between each of them when compared to their mainstream predecessors.

Problem with loot... is just that it is what it is. It's a paradox. You want that awesome thing that one person has that makes them better. But I submit to you a great quote of wisdom from Beavis and Butthead... "If nothing sucked, and like, everything was cool all the time... then it's like, how would you know it was cool?"

If you'd ever played in a D&D "Monty Hall" campaign, and you're just putting down +5 Vorpal Sword because you can't fit anymore into your Bags of Holding because they're filled with more +5 stuff, gems the size of watermelons, and your 500k worth of platinum in the other Bags of Holding till you get back to your empire of city-sized castles, elite gold dragon guards, ect...

Or like if you use trainers in games... say for instance diablo... you hack all the best items to have... so then now what is the point? Replayability is zero. Similar to being able to get a 999999 high score on an old arcade machine in one hit or jump. and the whole screen is filled with people who have the same damned 999999 score. What's the point?

Originally posted by LynxJSA

Originally posted by NeverLand7

I'm tired of game companies and developers trying to deceive me into keeping my subscription for longer because desirable gear only drops every 1,000-5,000 mob kills, or requires a large raid just to get 1 or 2 pieces of worthwhile gear, that will go to less than 2% of the party who helped get It.

 

Then play something else other than gear-centric raid MMOs?

or he could change his mindset and not be all about gear.

Originally posted by Lansid

 Evolution takes a "bit"...

The first "mainstream" MMO was Ultima Online, released in 1997. So what... 12 years later... we have what we got today. Pretty damned diverse if you look at the amount of MMO's, mainstream or otherwise, up for grabs.

Comparatively, I started playing an Atari 2600 around 1981... so 12 years later... I was playing Mechwarrior 1 or Wolfenstein 3-D on my 386DX-40, or playing the new badass game Mortal Kombat that had just come out for the SNES.

Compared to now, stuff was pretty archaic.

Point is... Things are still evolving and progressing. Call of Duty: World at War "could" be said to be a "clone" of Wolfenstein 3-D, or people can say that World of Warcraft is a clone of EQ... or Aion is a clone of World of Warcraft... on and on... but there's a significant evolution between each of them when compared to their mainstream predecessors.

Problem with loot... is just that it is what it is. It's a paradox. You want that awesome thing that one person has that makes them better. But I submit to you a great quote of wisdom from Beavis and Butthead... "If nothing sucked, and like, everything was cool all the time... then it's like, how would you know it was cool?"

If you'd ever played in a D&D "Monty Hall" campaign, and you're just putting down +5 Vorpal Sword because you can't fit anymore into your Bags of Holding because they're filled with more +5 stuff, gems the size of watermelons, and your 500k worth of platinum in the other Bags of Holding till you get back to your empire of city-sized castles, elite gold dragon guards, ect...

Or like if you use trainers in games... say for instance diablo... you hack all the best items to have... so then now what is the point? Replayability is zero. Similar to being able to get a 999999 high score on an old arcade machine in one hit or jump. and the whole screen is filled with people who have the same damned 999999 score. What's the point?

I do not disagree. But I did say that they should still keep some gear as rare but gear as a whole should not determine the total worth of you as a player, more so It should be their to enhance the players personality and individuality. By having lots of varied, unique and visually interesting gear while having maybe 75% of It obtained through having fun playing the game instead of grinding, mob camping, and obsessive raiding.

I do agree that It is a paradox though, very much so. If Life was all good and perfect, how could you grow or learn on one hand? How could you realize It is great? But in regards to how Loot is handled, there are solutions.

I believe the gear, items and content should be of unique variety and contain interesting things but It is also on the player not to play obsessively or constantly push power gaming, min/maxing etc or the game world takes a hit in regards to It's lively hood when the majority of players are oriented this way as well as the influence It has on future MMORPG's and their game designs.

Nope, I think it should not drop frequently at all.  If you want it to be that simple then you should start the game with it... whole premise behind an MMO is that its supposed to be an on-line world without an end... so to speak. 

After all, aspartame gives you brain tumors.

Originally posted by kiddyno071

Nope, I think it should not drop frequently at all.  If you want it to be that simple then you should start the game with it... whole premise behind an MMO is that its supposed to be an on-line world without an end... so to speak. 

Now that's taking It a little too far. I'm more talking about removing the over-sized grind involved In getting half decent gear. Not taking away gear as a nice bonus for playing the game.

I personally do not believe the incentive for continuing to play an MMORPG should be for how long It takes to get equipment you actually like.

When you actually think about It, that's a pretty poor incentive to keep subscribed to a game for 2 + years.

Originally posted by NeverLand7

Originally posted by kiddyno071

Nope, I think it should not drop frequently at all.  If you want it to be that simple then you should start the game with it... whole premise behind an MMO is that its supposed to be an on-line world without an end... so to speak. 

 

Now that's taking It a little too far. I'm more talking about removing the over-sized grind involved In getting half decent gear. Not taking away gear as a nice bonus for playing the game.

I personally do not believe the incentive for continuing to play an MMORPG should be for how long It takes to get equipment you actually like.

When you actually think about It, that's a pretty poor incentive to keep subscribed to a game for 2 + years.

The trend I see in MMO is too much focus on gear and having "that" gear!  I think it detracts from what is the true spirit of a MMO; as I have said before good gear should be player driven and great gear should be almost unheard of in a MMO.  Players should be able to cometically equip gear to get the look that they want but that gear should not influence the effectiveness in the game.  Just my Opinion nothing more.

I agree, the fad of gear based gameplay is pretty dull. I rather see a game that is more skill based. Not to mention this whole forced classes and cloned weapon/armor crap we our seeing...

I can only hope a new company breaks into the MMORPG field and gives us something worth buying...

Originally posted by Asheron-Ray

I agree, the fad of gear based gameplay is pretty dull. I rather see a game that is more skill based. Not to mention this whole forced classes and cloned weapon/armor crap we our seeing...

I can only hope a new company breaks into the MMORPG field and gives us something worth buying...

Yes, a fad going since 1974.

Gear, gear, gear...

For most, myself included, the first few mmorpg's you play killing mobs repeatedly and camping rare spawns for that ultra rare drop is fun. It does get old though and it looks like a lot of people have reached that point.

I would like to see them expand the gear in breadth instead of depth. Make the swords do a wider variety of things instead of just increasing the DPS. Make items more specialized so that one set of equipment isn't a panacea for all situations. Who knows, maybe this might encourage people work as a team *gasp*.

They can still make different "tiers" of equipment but the difference between the worst and the best shouldn't be so insanely large.

As for the frequency of item drops, I would like to see mobs only drop mats. Let the players craft everything. Make the items either decay over time or have them destroyed when you die. This will keep the economy moving and crafters working.