Originally posted by FrodoFragins

How many different heroes should you be good at in order to be successful.  I mean, can you just pick say 6-10 heroes to master and still be competitive?  You obviously have to learn how to deal with the other heroes when they face you.

 

I have a hard time with the support classes and it's harder to judge my own effectiveness in them if they aren't designed for PKs.

 

Also, what is the status of cheating.  Are maphacks impossible in LOL?  They always worried me in DOTA in WC3.  Does LOL hide other player movement from the client until the fog is lifted? 

Honestly, for PvP Normals you can get away with just having 1 champ that you play as. If someone else takes that champ, or if that champion really isn't what your team needs, just exit the game and try again in 5 minutes. Nobody expects you to be able to be competent with half a dozen champions for your first PvP game. Even after 500+ wins in normal and a few dozen in ranked, so far there are only 11 champions that I feel comfortable playing.

There are many reasons why it's hard to gauge your effectiveness with supports in bot matches. Bots don't engage intelligently and they don't back away intelligently, so the zone control skills that you should be practicing are just going to waste. Also you don't have to ward, and your 0cs (0 creep score; the support isn't supposed to kill the minions) also goes to waste because your ad carry isn't terribly dependent upon getting creep kills—they can kill the bots over and over fairly easily for gold.

The only cheat I've heard of is loldrop, which does a DDoS attack on a specific game server in order to crash a game before you lose it (and it shouldn't work anymore, they changed something about the way servers keep track of games). Spectators get all info on the players but they're on a 3 minute delay to avoid cheating. I'm pretty sure there is no way to map hack.

You know, I would actually like to see someone take the Riot Games approach to detecting bots: heavy-duty data mining. Riot's done a lot to identify certain types of behavior in League of Legends, and for the most part they identify the worst troublemakers by just analyzing the data across all the millions of games that are constantly being played.

They found (and temp banned) the people who were abusing the reporting tool to bully other players with false reports; all they had to do was check out what group of people were filing the most reports against players who had never been punished, and then narrow it down based on other similar data. They found (and temp banned) the people who were abusing the queue system by trolling their teammates into leaving the game before it started; all they had to do was check out how which players had the most games fail to start due to a teammate queue dodging, and then narrow it down based on other similar data. The data generated by these players made them a dead giveaway because of how different they act compared to a normal player. They were significant statistical outliers, and that made them easy to spot.

Bots would be several orders of magnitude easier to spot. While troublesome players act in a way that's somewhat different than other players, bots act with a predictability that no human being could possibly match. Given enough data, it wouldn't take more than a few minutes to sort out the players from the bots with a shocking amount of accuracy.

Let me give you an example. When you're moving in an MMO, about how far do you run in a straight line before changing directions? After defeating and looting an enemy, about how long do you wait before moving again? How often do you jump? These numbers vary from player to player and from session to session. If there are 5000 accounts running bots, all of them should have virtually identical values for all of these because their movement is governed by the same set of instructions. On a bell curve showing the mean, median, or mode for all players for any one of these statistics, the 5000 bots would appear as a glaringly obvious spike.

Even if the bot makers knew that you were specifically watching for this, they would be hardpressed to come up with a way around it. Since all of the bots are moving according to the same instructions, they're always going to be the same and thus appear abnormal. Even putting in deliberate randomness (wait for a random period of 1-20 seconds after looking a mob before moving again) wouldn't help because such regular randomness still doesn't look human. As long as the heuristic you're using to sniff out these bots is smart enough, you'll always find them.

But the even better part is that bot makers DON'T know specifically what you're watching for. If they don't know you're tracking straight-line distance and post-looting behavior, they don't even know that's where they'd need to add randomness. And that's far from the only option available... that's just movement alone. Trying to nail harvest bots? Track how long a node was spawned before the player harvested it. Track how often the player visits a node that wasn't the closest to him. Track how full his inventory is before he leaves the zone or logs out, or track how long he remains in the zone once his inventory is full. Combat: How often does his HP go below 1/2? How about his MP/energy? How full is his HP when he engages an enemy? How often does he rest? How long did it take him to hit level 20, how many items did he vendor in that time, how many quests has he done, how much damage has he dealt? All of these things expose bots as outliers, and you can even have a detection system that flags or bans as soon as it notices a player with values equal to those of previously confirmed bots.

You can't ensure that no one can ever bot in your game, but you can make it so that it's impossible to have a bot empire or a popular bot program. Heuristically identify behavior that doesn't match how human beings are playing your game.

Originally posted by strangewizard

 

If however, you added perma-death, and the ability to loot a player for everything on their person, it would fundamentally change the dynamics of the game. Killing someone now would actually mean something

No. It. Would. Not.

There's this maddeningly persistent idea that a permadeath system could cause people to treat death and murder as they do in real life. There's no precedent for it, and no logic behind it.

It is wrong to kill a person. It is not wrong to kill a character in a video game, especially if the whole point of the game is to go around killing people. So none of the usual tropes that apply to death in real life and in fiction—mourning, vengeance, fear of dying—can apply to an MMO character's death. Killing is nothing like real killing. It's closer to stealing. Except, no, it's not even that! We put systems into place to discourage people from stealing from one another; if we could wipe it out entirely, we would. But a FFA permadeath MMO puts it right on the front of the box as the best feature of the entire game: kill and be killed by anyone at any time, full loot your enemies and make them start over at level 1! It's the entire draw of the game.

Killing and stealing are wrong and you're not supposed to do them. Killing in a game, even one with permadeath, can never have the same effect on the virtual society because it is not something that you're not supposed to do.

"I have an idea for a game."

^ This right here represents about 0.001% of what goes into making a game. It's why no one will hire you just because you have good ideas for games. Almost nothing about what makes a game great comes from the idea that spawned the game, and almost everything about what makes a game great comes from how that idea is implemented.

IP is one more step removed from "I have an idea for a game." It's "I have a world or story about which one could come up with an idea for a game." No matter how good the IP is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the game.

It's the death of the Spades, man. The internet killed the Spade player archetype. There's no value in being a guru who knows a lot of obscure secrets or who has mathematically analyzed various builds. Information on "how do I beat this quest" or "which spell should I learn" used to be passed around through in-game chat. Finding something else and then relaying it to other people that you knew was part of gameplay. Now it's something you do outside the game, on forums and wikis.

I think it's something we just have to let go of. Puzzles and secret crafting recipes may have a place in other single-player or multiplayer games, but they really don't belong in MMOs anymore.

Originally posted by Dewm

 

Reason number 1,298,312,343 I like FFXI..

 

When you crafted a item it had a chance of being Normal quality, High Quality +1, HQ +2 or HQ +3

and it changed the stats of the item. So a NQ wax sword was worth pennies, but a wax sword +3 could be worth millions.

 

plus they had a crap-ton of items to build...

and it was actually worth making middle level items, because it took long enough to level that if you paid a bit for a level 20 sword it was ok, because you would use it for 2-4 levels...which equaled maybe 2 weeks play time?

Are you sure you're not thinking of FFXIV? FFXI doesn't have multiple qualities for crafted items. You can get normal or +1, that's it. Crafted consumables can go as high as +3, but not equipment. The +2 and +3 equipment pieces that do exist come from the Trial quests, not crafting.

Glad you're enjoying it so far. :)  Which champions have you tried?

While there are a lot of complaints about the community, the system for reporting players has had a lot of thought put into it. People really do get banned pretty quickly if they go around dropping racial slurs or intentionally dying a dozen times just to piss their team off. The bigger problem you'll run into is playing with and against skilled players on smurf accounts. But because of the matchmaking system, anyone who gets that many wins in a row will start getting matched up against higher level accounts.

Generally, once you get to higher level games, one person (the jungler) will have the role of exclusively running around killing the neutral mob camps so that they're not taking experience and gold from a lane. This doesn't happen as much when you're low level because runes and masteries have an effect on how easily you can clear those camps without taking a lot of damage. Around level 20 it will become more common than not to see a jungler on both teams.

Originally posted by Lissyl

Imagine having the -entire pool- of traps available in the entire game randomly determined for each and every room as you enter it.  So you could (very very rarely) come across a -real- death-trap of a room...or more commonly, there will be no traps at all. 

This is a pretty huge problem with games that go beyond the event horizon of excessive randomness.

One of the ways that games appeal to gamers is that they offer a sort of enforced fairness. Every obstacle that you're given can be beaten somehow. There are no obstacles that can't be overcome unless the challenge is to figure out that you can't overcome it and you need to find another way. You're never going to get to World 8-2 of Super Mario Bros and find a huge wall with a large pit in front of it, making it impossible for you to ever get to the end of the level and the end of the game. It's never going to happen.

That's one of the ways that video games comfort us where real life can't. Later today, a bridge you're driving across might collapse and there will be no action you can take to save yourself. Tonight, you might wake up in a burning building and there will be no path you can take that will get you out alive. Life is unfair like that, and games aren't.

Even when people talk about really really difficult games or difficult sections of games, they're always talking about something that can be beaten. A section where nothing you do can possibly get you past the obstacle isn't hard, it's stupid. (Again, not counting obstacles that you overcome by making sure you don't encounter them.)

If a game kills you in a situation where there's no action you could have possibly taken to survive, it's generally recognized as a very bad game. A room that randomly ends up with a certain-death combination of traps is one example. Another example would be a monster that does a random attack every 4 seconds, and one of the attacks is a highly-damaging 4 second AOE stun. If there truly is no way to avoid or cancel the stun, there's a small chance that the monster will use the stun a few times in a row in wipe the whole group.

So one of the dangers of randomizing a world, dungeon, or encounter in too many ways is that you lose control over whether it is fair or not. And gamers go into games with the understanding that there is fairness on some level... that the game will not present them with an unwinnable challenge unless it's a challenge that is unwinnable by design for a reason.

Originally posted by Master10K

Worst thing is that you should not buy any runes until you are level 20 and can get Tier 3 runes. Tier 1 & Tier 2s are a waste of IP.

 

Agreed. It's best if you do not spend any IP on Tier 1 or 2 runes. When you do get access to Tier 3, this page makes a very good reference. Most runes are not worth using; stick to the ones that he designates S-Rank or A-Rank.

I would not say that playing with an unlocked camera is absolutely necessary, but it grants you a major advantage. If you can get used to it, I highly recommend it.

Getting dozens of kills against bots is somewhat influenced by runes and individual champions, but it's mostly a matter of confidence. When you know everything about the capabilities of your enemies, and the capabilities of the champ you're playing, you can simply commit to every fight that's going to end in your favor. A human player can get "zoned" by a skilled opponent: they will stay a certain distance away from that opponent, because they know that they won't escape alive if they get any closer. Bots have no concept of staying away from a fight that they're guaranteed to lose. So it's easy to rack up unlimited kills once you know that you can beat them in a straight up fight.

Originally posted by Homitu

I don't disagree with the proposal for varying difficulties in MMOs, but I do have a fundamental objection with this specific approach to it.  This just farts in the face of character progression.  It would make every upgrade one receives while playing on a harder difficulty feel utterly pointless.  What's the point when I could just as easily boost myself to higher stats by turning down the difficulty?

Even when one understands that progression tredmills during leveling or post-level cap are all arbitrary, the illusion still exists that our characters are actually getting more powerful relative to the rest of the world.  This proposal would evaporate this illusion and make it all feel worthless.  

Instead, I'd suggest something like full servers with different difficulty settings, and then perhaps a feature like GW2's Guesting where you can temporarily play any of your characters on another server so that you wouldn't have to reroll completely every time you tried a different difficulty.  

It would just feel much better from a progression standpoint to increase the power of the enemies you face rather than nerf or artificially boost individual players' characters.  

My sentiments exactly. Progression is a key element of RPGs, both MMO and non-MMO. Anything that says "you can be more powerful right now if you want" runs counter to the core mechanic of the game.

Originally posted by cheyane

I tried Sona cos she was free and all and I really am bad at playing her was a disaster died like 4 times in a bot game then I tried Garan the melee guy also free and did way better , even managed 6 champ kills . So I bought Master Yi instead of a support champ. 

 

I really like the game .

I actually came into the thread to recommend Sona, it's a shame that you didn't have a good time playing her. It is helpful to learn the abilities of all of the characters so that you know what to watch out for. Playing a tankier champion (instead of a fragile champ like Sona) gives you a more little leeway to make the mistake of getting too close to an enemy champion who is dangerous enough to kill you. After you get a little more used to the game, I hope you do give support another try.

One very very important thing to remember is that kills and deaths are not a good indicator of how good you are at the game, especially when playing a support role. If your death is a sacrifice that allows someone else on your team to get away or secure a kill on the enemy carry, that's a trade in your team's favor. Support champions shouldn't be getting kills—in fact, it's not a stretch at all to say that a 0/6 Soraka is probably doing a better job than a 6/6 Soraka.

If you ever want to quickly find out the abilities of a champion that you're playing again, search for Champion Mini on Ciderhelm's YouTube channel. Among other things, he does these mini 30-second videos that quickly explain how to play against a certain champ.

Okay, I have never played EVE but I feel as though this is too blatantly obvious to mention. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

You're in space in this game, right?

When you execute a crazy flying maneuver in a video game (whether in a plane or as a person with flying powers), you feel like you're zooming and diving and taking tight corners and whatnot. The reason for this is that your surroundings provide a frame of reference. There's the ground ahead of you, and it's approaching fast; that means you're diving. There's a sideways skyscraper above you and to your left, and it is rotating; that means you're banking left around a skyscraper.

In space, there is no frame of reference other than the distant stars millions of light years away. Without something to compare your ship to, there is no way to convey the fact that you're moving. Picture Sonic the Hedgehog without the background. Just a nondescript grey square behind him. No matter how fast his little red feet spin, you wouldn't feel like he's moving. Same goes for space. There's no way to add the feeling of moving unless there is an environment with things in it, which space kind of lacks. If they let you control the ship with airplane-like controls, it would feel wrong.

Deus Ex is one of those games that exists to tell a story. The characters and atmosphere exist to fill in the details. It's a game based around narrative. While I would not call it a linear game strictly speaking, the player's path is very constrained. This ensures that the player sees and hears everything they're supposed to in the correct order so that they are able to take in the whole story.

MMOs are almost the complete opposite. MMOs are about the player and his or her own accomplishments, as well as their interactions with others. This type of game has very little to do with experiencing a set story. You could put the world of Deus Ex in an MMO but it would be a completely different game because the reasons for playing it would be completely different.

Originally posted by jusomdude

Think about it. Paying a company $20+ dollars to run an automatic script to change one variable.

Complete robbery.

On the other hand, if you report another player for harassment, it may take several hours of investigation and information gathering to resolve that issue to your satisfaction. Same goes for your character being deleted due to a bug.

So getting customer service to help you with those should cost a pretty penny.

Originally posted by nate1980

Because then PvP will be more like it is in real life. In short, we now have a virtual world to live in. Just like in real life, there would be very few murderers in the virtual world, and far more law enforcement officials than murderers. Just like in real life, we can have organized wars over resources, land and etc. and it'd be far more fun than random PKing.

The OP isn't the only one with a dream that in a virtual world MMORPG, a guild could build an actual kingdom, castle and villages, with political powers to trade, diplomacy, and even war with other kingdoms, with the chance to conquer other kingdoms and create an empire. However, this all requires intelligence, organization, and maturity.

That sounds like fun but what do organized wars have to do with open world PvP? You could very easily make a game like this with combat that's purely consensual.

Imagine I've made a game where player guilds can do all those things you mentioned: go to war over resources, conquer other kingdoms, etc. Now sell me on the idea of allowing random PKing to happen too. Convince me to change the game so a ganker can run up to anybody and attack them without provocation.

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Kyleran

(Why restrict people from doing what they really want to?)

Golly, I dunno, Mommy says we have laws and stuff so people can get along.  Ninjas never say that tho, Ninjas have Real Ultimate Power.  These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

(Sorry man, just such an elementary question; the only place it ever turns up is in PvP threads and Junior High.)

 

The real world has legislation that discourages people from killing each other. A video game world can have actual programming that makes it impossible for people to kill each other. What I'm asking is not "why would you want a game where people don't run around slaughtering each other like maniacs" but rather "why would you want a game that's designed to allow people to run around slaughtering each other like maniacs, and then complain about it?"

Originally posted by Kyleran

All depends really on whether you are trying to build a more realistic virtual world, where a harsh justice system would make sense, or a PVP focused game, where it would make no sense at all.  Why restrict people from doing what they really want to?

There was a problem with part of your post: it was in parentheses, not italicized, not bolded, not underlined, not brightly colored, and not a huge font. I fixed it for you.

This is a question that people should not be ignoring. Implementing a way of punishing gankers via justice system or automatic penalties is ridiculous in a game where you're supposed to go around attacking other players, which—shockingly—is the case for open world PvP games.

What is the goal, here? What's the perfect game at the end of this discussion? A game where anyone can attack you but no one ever does because of the consequences? What is the allure of a game like that?

Originally posted by solarine

There's something very important the anti-ganking players don't seem to understand about how many so-called "gankers" view PVP-ruleset-MMO-gaming... 

To what you'd call a ganker, the whole point of the game [in a PVP ruleset server] is to fight the other players.

Questing, crafting, exploration, progression... these are merely means that serve to take you to the "end", which is of course, fighting other players.

I wonder if this phenomenon is easier to notice in a game like Planetside, where there is absolutely nothing else to do besides gets into fight with enemy players. There is no questing or crafting, progression is automatic like in EVE. The only things you can do are fight or prepare for a fight. In such a game, you would clearly never spare an enemy just because they had a circumstancial disadvantage. Those enemy players exist solely to make your side lose the war.

Originally posted by Creslin321

I was never saying that I didn't want to allow one player to gank another, ever...I'm just saying that it needs to be controlled, WAY more than it is now if the original "dream" is to ever be achieved.  Yes, we need villians, but we can't have the world be 60% villianous mass murderers.

Villiany needs to have a much higher price, and be much more difficult than it is now.  As it stands now, in almost every FFA PvP game, it is much more profitable to be a ganker than anything else.  So it's no surprise that they devolve into gankfests.

I dunno, to me this still sounds like having your cake and eating it. The allure of an open PvP world is that it's dangerous and you can't let your guard down. Let's say someone's been killed a few times and they're at the point where they feel getting jumped by the same guy would be "excessive". Do they deserve to be free from that danger?

Actually, let me go all out with a (horrible) hypothetical solution. I think that might demonstrate the point I'm trying to make a little more clearly. Give everyone the ability to toggle PvP off on a person by person basis. If you feel that it's inappropriate for someone to attack you, you type /unpvp Disdena or whatever, and they can't interact with you anymore. This is immediately recognizable as a bad solution because people would be able to bow out of every fight, even the appropriate ones. Wait, what's "appropriate"? If the attacked player thinks the attack is inappropriate, isn't that enough? Isn't that what we're talking about solving: stopping people from inappropriately attacking?

The root of the problem is that Player A  thinks he should be able to attack Player B, and Player B doesn't think he should be able to be attacked by Player A (at least not without severe consequence). As long as this gap remains, there is no possible system that will work. You need the entire playerbase to be in agreement on what's okay in PvP and what's not, and that is next to impossible.