Originally posted by c0exist
Not sure if anyone has posted this or if this is available in other mmo's but I think a good idea would be to have different types of servers.  Instead of just the usual PVE and PVP servers how about a "hard mode" server.  And by hard mode i mean less exp per mob kill, mobs are more difficult so forced partying is in play, and of course since the world is harder there will be better drops and exclusive drops to the harder servers. 

Why is this necessary?

Creating two separate servers means that those two groups of people will never meet. So why would you need to make sure that people on the easymode servers don't have access to certain drops? They cannot possibly influence your enjoyment of the game; they're on a completely different server.

Originally posted by g4m3sh4rk

As the title suggests this thread is about the current state of mmo gaming. After reading through countless hours of threads, the general theme seems to be why game x sucks. As it also occurs to me, there are more then ample posts dipicting peoples loss of interest in the genre as a whole. Some, even, went as far as to say that recent MMO's fail because of a lack of enginuity. Well I say we could do better. I say we, the gamming community, could in-fact create an rpg that can be shared by all with an epic lore, septuple phase boss fights that last for longer then the usual time, and a great method for which to deliver both story and challenge. Best of all, we as a community could do it with out falling prey to the common short commings of our predisessors.  

 

So... if you could make an MMO how would you do it and why?

Epic lore? Boss fights?? Story??? Challenge????

BEGONE, HERETIC! GIVE US A BOX OF SAND WITH NOTHING IN IT SO PLAYERS MAKE THEIR OWN CONTENTNRRRGARGHLEBLARGLE

You there. The one reading this post on this forum right now. Why aren't you exercising? Don't you know how good it is for you? Stand up, do some jumping jacks, some push-ups, grab a dumbell and do a few curls. Throw your shoes on a jog around the block. It only takes a few minutes! The health benefits are astronomical. Work out for a few minutes and you're potentially adding another day to your life expectancy as your risk of heart disease and obesity go down.

But you're not stopping to exercise right now. (Maybe you are... kudos to you, I wouldn't do that just because an internet guy pretended to address me directly.) You can't see the effect it has on your body, so there's less gratification involved in doing so. You don't get clear and immediate feedback saying that your health has improved as the result of 20 push-ups.

That's the main draw of gaming in general, if you can believe it. It's why it feels fun to jump on Koopas for an hour but not fun to bag groceries for an hour (even though the paycheck at the end of the week is a far better reward). Video games give you immediate positive feedback for your accomplishments in a way that real life usually does not. Even though the rewards are not "real", we feel more rewarded getting those fake rewards than real rewards like money and long life.

And that is why we have levels to measure progression. "You gained 1400 exp" feels immediately rewarding in a way that levelless progression usually does not. You might be able to say to yourself "Killing this enemy put me a tiny bit closer to the end of this dungeon, which will have a treasure chest, that might give me a piece of the Haste spellrune which, when combined with 9 other pieces, will allow me to cast spells 5% faster." But that reward is too far off. Even if you gain power at the same rate using this method (compared to getting exp and levels from the mobs you're going through), the individual kills will feel less rewarding and you'll feel less of a sense of progress.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

They also break the level disparity problem as most MOBAs start you at level 1 and you level up through the match. While the balance of power can start to swing heavily to one side in a match, the next match starts again with a level playing field.

Level disparity AND equipment disparity AND (outside of instanced battlegrounds) body count disparity. Not to mention the skill disparity that is solved by most MOBA's ranking and matchmaking systems. It is a rare thing to have even a 1v1 fight in an MMO that feels fair, let alone an unorchestrated many-vs-many fight.

I think there are very valid ways for a game to present a challenge that feels good to overcome even though there is no threat of losing. In fact, I might even say that the best kinds of challenges are the ones where losing is synonymous with "haven't won yet."

Probably the best way I can explain this would be to point to the adventure games made by LucasArts and Sierra back in the day. Both were basically the same type of game. You walk around picking up items and using them on other items or on objects in various locations. But in Sierra games, you could die (forcing you to reload from a save) or even worse, you could make a mistake that resulted in an unwinnable game. LucasArts games didn't have either of those. You couldn't accidently miss or misuse a vital item, and trying to do something fatal resulted in a funny message instead.

If a game's meant to test your puzzle-solving ability, games from both of these publishers did that adequately. But Sierra games were also testing your frustration levels, making you replay from a save or start over from the beginning when you (inevitably) screwed up. I don't think that going through that test makes for a better victory. If you find out the answer to the puzzles, that's where the sense of victory should come from.

Where MMOs are concerned, the question of whether you should be beaten often and whether it should sting COMPLETELY hinges upon what kind of core gameplay experience the game is trying to deliver. And wanting to give players a "challenge" is NOT the only prerequisite for invoking frequent defeats with harsh death penalties. You don't need to be defeated to be challenged.

Originally posted by Maelwydd

Originally posted by Disdena

How many times have you played a game like GTA or Saints Row and decided not to break the law because it would result in a totally effing sweet police chase potentially ending with your magnificent death? That's how effective a bounty system is at stopping ganks.

Well if by death you mean fail and die, for good, no reloading from a save....then that is a good deterent and in a single player game reloading is part of the game design. It is not in an MMO so you can't use a single player game design to justify the deisgn of a multiplayer one.

The only real comparrison would be if you couldn't reload from a save in GA or SR...would you still break the law for that car chase if you knew getting caught ment you would have to stat the game again from the start? If you had to think about it then that proves the point.

I would, if I didn't care about beating the game. That more or less proves my point. Since it is only a game, there is very little reason to care about the consequences, especially if having a high level character with a bunch of cool swag is NOT your goal. Haven't you ever turned on an old SNES game (the kind with limited lives and continues) and done a bunch of goof-off stuff rather than playing the game seriously? Did the Game Over screen make you feel bad after all your lives were gone?

Even in single player games with one life and no saving, it would still be absurd to call police surveillance a deterrent. It would be part of a system where you weigh one risk against another. Gotta get downtown in 2 minutes: drive my car or steal a faster one? I've got 1 cop chasing me: try to lose him or stay on target? You would design it to test the player's decisions, not to punish them for making a morally wrong choice.

How many times have you played a game like GTA or Saints Row and decided not to break the law because it would result in a totally effing sweet police chase potentially ending with your magnificent death? That's how effective a bounty system is at stopping ganks.

Time and time and time again people bring up this notion that "Open world PvP is great, but the reason some people don't like it is that they can be killed for no reason by someone they have no hope of defeating. Let's try to fix that!" It's not fixable, because it's the point of playing the game. You get killed a bunch while becoming stronger and smarter, and your efforts pay off as you get good enough to defend yourself or even attack others.

If the point of bounties and jails is to prevent other players from attacking without cause, then WHY allow them to attack other players without cause? Why build it into the game? You don't have to; most games don't. You are quite literally stating that a feature should be added to the game—one that is not present in most games—and then the players who use that feature should be punished in the harshest way you can think of.

Think back to the GTA example I gave. The point of the Wanted system in that game is certainly not to discourage players from breaking the law. I hope that is obvious. The feature exists in order to create gameplay. You'd have to be a pretty poor game designer to look at GTA and say "The Wanted system needs to have much harsher consequences because right now it's definitely not doing enough to prevent unlawful behavior."

Originally posted by AlBQuirky

I applaud your passion, but...

To:
Nexon America
I have played Vindictus since the start of Closed Beta and over the years the quality of the game servers have plummeted to various lows, and i am fed up with it.

But because i enjoy the game so much, i am not going to simply abandon it like others have.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

Can only closed beta testers sign this petition? That kind of limits those who can sign, doesn't it? Otherwise they are liars if they sign it.

If they cared, would this be a problem?
Are you paying them money or playing for free?
How about all the other signers?
What are you threatening them with if they don't comply with your demands of them?
What are you offering them if they do comply?
Do you think they are aware of the problems or not?

Nexon America is a business, not a Government agency that caters to special interest groups. Just like NCSoft (with the CoH closing petition), it does absolutely nothing. *You* have no say in the way they run their business, other than not playing their games. They don't answer to *you* or however many sign this. They answer to their board of directors and investors.

I have been in customer service for many years and know that customers that demand things from a business are the worst customers a business can have. They end up costing the business much more than they give back.

This reminds me of a "hot topic" awhile back in my community. Rush Limbaugh said something offensive. *gasp* Like that isn't to be expected. All these left wingnuts who never listen to the show, nor patronize his sponsors, threaten the local station that carries his show with what? To not listen and support the advertisers with their business that they don't even do now anyways?

Petitions have their place. And when used correctly, they can work wonders. Usually in letting the Government know that the populace so terribly represented by people they voted for is not happy. Petitions have NO place dictating to businesses how to run their show. None of them answer to *you* (general you, in this case).

I have quoted your post, and highlighted all the parts I agreed with in green.

I think this issue is more closely tied to the concept of "endgame" and a level cap. In any given MMORPG, there may be quests, there may be special dungeons, there may be activities you can do for improved faction standing or money or some alternate currency. But one thing remains the same across virtually every single MMORPG in existence: if you go out and hit ANY sufficiently difficult enemy until it dies, you will gain a discrete amount of progress. Might be in the form of your sword skill improving, might be in the form of an xp bar filling up. Whatever it is, you get measurably stronger in some way. The ANY is bolded because that's the key word. It doesn't matter what you fight as long as it's strong enough.

At some point, this stops happening. You're no longer allowed to go out and hit ANY monster with your sword. You may have a dozen different things you can do to progress your character—raid dungeons for better gear, perform missions for quest points, farm valuable materials to sell, camp a rare spawn—but from that point on you can never again progress in the way that you were able to for the entire game.

Players pay a lot of attention to where this point is, and how much you can do after reaching this point ("endgame"). I would really like to see some discussion about why endgame exists as a deliberately different mode of playing. Why are you allowed to achieve progression in one way for so long (potentially months or years of play) and then told you can't earn progression that way anymore? This is basically just what the OP was asking, but with the focus on XP vs. no XP rather than solo vs. forced group.

What's happening here (and in a lot of other threads) is that the OP has a particular experience in mind. "Wouldn't it be fun if I were in a game and yadda yadda yadda happened... let me think of a way to design a game around this imagined experience." The end result is a simply awful idea for a game, because it was designed with just that ideal scenario in mind.

Even though it's not an MMO, I'll use Arkham Asylum as an example. Imagine the best, most epic experience someone could possibly have in that game, the kind that makes you jump up and fist pump, and tell the story to everyone you know for weeks afterwads.

Hmm... Batman goes into a room, and there's 9 guards, armed with a variety of weapons, and he beats them all with a flawless full combo.

No, go more epic than that. Okay, uh, one hit will kill him, so there's a huge amount of pressure to make sure he doesn't get hit.

More epic than that. Um, there's a really short time limit? So at the same time he's trying not to get hit, he has to beat them as fast as he possibly can, and there's just barely enough time to pull it off.

Make it more epic. He only gets one chance at the fight. Either his save gets erasd for losing, or it's a special bonus fight that you can only ever attempt once.

More epic. The enemies are unique enemies that he's seeing for the first time, so he can only rely on his reflexes and not memorized patterns or tells.

Put all of this together, and you have gamer nirvana. Can you even picture it? You walk into a room and 9 brand new enemies assault you. In 30 seconds, you have to beat them without taking a single hit and getting your save erased, despite having to figure out their unique abilities on the fly. You pull it off just barely in an absolutely amazing display of skill and coordination with just a split second to spare. It would probably be the best 30 seconds of gaming in your entire life.

It would also make an amazingly bad game, because the planets would have to align for that to have even a chance of happening to a single person. 99.9999% of the people who played the game would have a much worse experience trying to play that game. You shouldn't ever design a game completely around the best possible thing that could happen, and I think that's the mistake being made here. Frankly, I think that most people with big design ideas for sandbox MMOs make the same mistake. As they describe their dream game, they're planning it around the 1-in-a-million epic experience they would love to have rather than considering what the average experience or worst-case experience in the same game world would be.

Originally posted by Siveria

Actually its more wow-clones that is killing the indistry, since wow has come out name one AAA mmo that hasn't just copy and pasted most of its gameplay from wow. Only one I can name is FF14. WoW was only as successful as it was due to a classic case of perfect timing on its release. If the gameplay was all that good and how the game flows, then all these wow-clones wouldn't be crashing and burning in less than 6 months. They do poorly because people who aren't playing wow anymore and are looking for a mmo, aren't interested in bascally play the exact same game with a new skin (rift, tsw, swtor etc all suffer from this).

Why name-drop FFXIV as a counter-example, then turn around and immediately say that WoW clones crash and burn in less than 6 months? XIV crashed faster and harder than any of the WoW clones. DC Universe Online is another example of a AAA MMO that was pretty substantially different than WoW but suffered a mass exodus shortly after launch and went F2P in 10 months.

You can't say that AAA WoW clones are doing terrible because they copied WoW. AAA MMOs that are not named World of Warcraft are doing bad in general, and the ones doing especially bad are the ones that were major departures from the WoW formula.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by Onomas

Ill never play anything with a cash shop.

And if you google it, americans spend more on cash shops in a month than your average gamer with 1 year sub for 15/month. I mean seriously, is this an issue? 50 cents a day?

But main problem i feel, is no good games worth the money. If you havent noticed the newer mmo's are kind of slacking in all departments now.

http://www.newzoo.com/press-releases/global-mmo-games-spending-exceeds-12bn/

"Of all 50 million MMO gamers in the US, 23 million spend money on free-to-play or subscription MMOs."

"When zooming in on transaction data for a single month, the ARPPU for individual titles in May 2012 was $17 compared to $27 in October 2011"

So yes, you are right, the paying ones spent $17 .. a bit more than $15. But note two things:

1) A majority (27 out of 50m) did NOT pay.

2) The amount spent by those who pay is decreasing (from $27 to $17 in two years)

"Free-to-play or subscription MMOs" may encompass more territory than you think, based on the group that study's coming from. Does that include MMOs like Farmville, The Sims, and Magic: the Gathering Online? We consider those substantially different than real MMOs, but they have the potential to all get lumped together into the same market by surveys like this.

Originally posted by XAPGames

People who play free are built into the business model.

 

They make the game world more lively by increasing population.  (an empty game is a dead game)

They often bring in other players, which reduces advertising costs and increases revenue because people they bring in might pay.

They provide fresh meat for PVP.  (in a game with all whales in top-shelf gear, the whales wouldn't have an advantage)

They might end up spending money.

 

Dev / publishers don't give out free access because they want to lose money on them.  They give out free access because they want to use the player as a way to make money.

Agreed. I don't know how there are so many people talking about online gaming who can't understand this concept.

The people running the game want free players. There is no company anywhere that celebrates when "freeloaders" leave their game.

This is indeed backwards logic.

I play F2P games occasionally. I never pay anything for them (with one exception) but I also don't complain about them. If playing the game for free is not fun, I stop playing.

If someone plays an F2P game for free and complains that it is Pay To Win, I would encourage them to do what I do: uninstall. Don't gripe about it, don't insist on the forums that they change it, don't run to the window and bellow the developers' flaws to the world. Just leave, without a grudge.

You're suggesting that someone in that situation should not only continue to play the game, but should begin paying for it, with the intention of changing the entire paradigm of how game companies charge for their services. Uh uh, nope. There are too many games out there to bother with this tactic. If the game you're playing doesn't have the type of fiscal model that you like, go find one that does. There will ALWAYS be Play To Win games, because there will ALWAYS be players who want to pay for power. Why think that you can undo that? Why even try?

I seem to have interpreted the topic in a different way.

Let's say you're reading a novel. Two of the main characters are talking in a shopping mall. The chapter ends, and the next chapter begins with a minor character at her apartment. But wait! What happened to the mall? Does it still exist?

It doesn't make sense to answer that question with "yes" or "no". It's a meaningless question because "existence" doesn't have a meaning in this context. The mall and the characters don't really exist even when you're reading about them. Why even ask? It doesn't make sense.

Approach an online game from the same angle. You're the only person in a dungeon. You walk out. Does the dungeon still exist? Are the orcs and goblins still scurrying around the corridors while no one's there to aggro them? In a sense, those goblins don't exist even when you are fighting them. Still, you could answer yes with some justification if the servers work that way. But you're better off realizing that it doesn't matter. The idea that When I leave this world, it's still there is pure illusion. It's not there. There is no there, it's a fictional world. And there is really no use in begrudging the game server for not continuing to run a simulation with no audience just for giggles. We don't expect the novel to go on continuously describing the mall for the entire remainder of the book just because the characters went there once.

It's different if the game's draw is its persistence. If, for example, you leave the game and think to yourself "When I come back, things may be different. The fence I built might get knocked down. The acolyte I met might become head priestess, or might leave to become a traveling missionary." Farmville is a great example of an online game that is built entirely around persistence. The fact that things change in the time that you're gone is vital to the game's core mechanic. The entire game depends upon this. If you don't care about what's changed while you were logged off, the persistence is completely going to waste.

And I think that's perhaps the message that was intended. Focusing on the persistent aspect of MMOs means missing the point. Persistence must serve a purpose or else it's just a feature for the sake of having that feature. If you necessarily exclude any game from being called an MMORPG because it is lobby-based, are you sure you know what the genre is all about?

Food for thought: Despite the supposed importance of a persistent world—even to the extent of keeping empty areas "running" with no players inside—how many MMOs keep the player character in the world when the player logs out? If lobbies and instances break the illusion of a fictional world so easily, how do you rationalize a player character ceasing to exist whenever the player stops playing?

Originally posted by Arglebargle

Auction Houses tend to make games more fun for one type of player, and less fun for another.   Know your target audience, and prepare accordingly.

Quoted for truth.