If it doesn't have to be an MMO Dark Spore had a similar system... although I found it annoying playing and itemizing so many characters.

Originally posted by Achyl

^  I like how much thought you put into this.

I wish I could read that giant block of text, what sort of super-eye-sight do you possess. 

I think "always online" is code for "DRM". Not that I mind that, because like you I do have 24/7 internet connectivity, and I pay for my games.

I don't think it would fly. MMOs rely on repeated content quite a bit these days (instances, shared newbie zones, daily quests, battleground... you name it). Horror might get you the first time, maybe the second, but after the 5th time it's really just old news. 

There are things that WOULD work, but require some changes to your typical MMO-fare:

1. Need loads of dynamic content

2. Need forced first person view (think Amnesia the Dark Descent) 

3. Almost needs forced full-screen, although this doesn't really fly in games anymore. 

4. Might need perma-death as someone mentioned

Thanks for the pvp links! Very helpful, and pretty awesome :) I also enjoy the "Lonley Sequer" video that is in that thread too... poor Sequer lol

Same, playing perpetuum atm, will check out Vanguard once it goes F2P. I tried Fallen Earth and it was OK. Could look into Xsyon, Mortal Online, Haven and Hearth, Wurm Online... although none of those are close to the quality of EVE/Perpetuum.

Also...

Inb4 Quizzical suggests UWO (which I have never played but probably would be a fine suggestion)

Seems like such a troll thread, at least I'm not the only one who thought about posting. Massively is a real world. Adverbs can modify adjectives and verbs alike. And words just get added to the dictionary from regular use in the english language, so any word can get added if commonly used, meaning... its all made up as long as it falls within the rules of the english language... which massively does.

Originally posted by troublmaker

I'll bite the bullet.

Pay2Win means any money exchange that will allow a player to gain a significant advantage over their opponents.

Race changing in World of Warcraft is a Pay2Win exchange because it allows you to trade out a weak race for a stronger one.  The argument here is if the person race changing did not invest the extra money they'd be playing worse.

The most common Pay2Win cash shop component is not gear, it is power ups.  A lot of times in Pay2Win model of free to play games they will give you a pretty crippled character.  You can purchase power ups to make it into a normal character like any other game.

Another Pay2Win model is class unlocks.  For free you can play the crappy classes.  For a subscription or a purchase you can play better characters.  This is the model League of Legends uses in which it gives you some free characters but will offer all of the powerful ones for money.  In this model there is no attempt to balance classes.

The final kind of pay to win is when you are getting gear kits or gear enhancers that will make your current gear better.

Some things can act as a Play2Win model in some games but not others.  Mounts are generally an aesthetic purchase.  However if the mount has health or makes you go faster than the free mounts or is available sooner to people who pay, it is Pay2Win.  For example having a Level 20 mount in Age of Conan's hardcore server will allow you to run away from fights and chase down and camp people easier.

While I agree with you about the race change in WoW (never really thought about that) I would disagree about class unlocks  in a few examples including the one you mentioned (LoL).

Anyone who plays League of Legends competitively plays a lot. And every new champion that LoL comes out with is purchasable via IP (which you earn through normal play). Although anyone who plays LoL competitively will tell you that such an assumption that the new champs are "better" is absolutely absurd.

Another example I would site for class unlocks would be EQ which just went F2P with cash shop, the free classes are Warrior/Cleric/Wizard/Rogue. I don't know about anyone else, but Warrior/Cleric/Wizard/Rogue are CORE group components of that game, and Cleric is probably one of the "most powerful" classes in the game.

I'm sure there are examples of class unlocks which are completely unbalanced, but mentioning LoL makes me... lol. Everything else I agree with you.

To me, pay2win means one of two things.

1, There is no possible way to obtain the same item (or result of said item) without paying money. Note this only applies to non-cosmetic items.

2. There is a severe balance issue between the amount of time spent in-game to obtain the same results of $10 from the cash shop. Meaning if it takes you 6 hours of playtime to obtain something that costs $10 in the cash shop, that is probably reasonable. But if it takes you 100 hours of playtime to obtain something that costs $10 in the cash shop, then there is a severe balance issue and the developers are forcing you to buy.

#1 Is a clear advantage, I have "sword of killing you +5" and you can't get it without paying. 

#2 is a bit fuzzier and essentially means that either you can spend money on the game to get an advantage or say goodbye to your friends, family, wife, job etc. just to get some minor item that costs barely anything. 

Originally posted by Devvholic

I have played eve and enjoyed it but i dont wanna have to pay for the game and then the subscription is the thing

You liked EVE you could try perpetuum, I consider it EVE-light (less complex for better or worse). There's no initial cost and $10 a month sub.

Originally posted by laokoko

Ya so everyone hate battlegrounds, so why dont' they just go out to the world to kill each other instead of doing battle ground?

The reality is alot of people "dont' mind" battleground, not necessary they like battleground more than world pvp, but are just sick of trying to find people outside of battleground, or getting into unfair battle.

 

I disagree, people who hate battlegrounds need to play the battlegrounds to be compettive in ANY form of PvP, be it battlegrounds, arenas or open world pvp. If you purely played open world pvp you would get slaughtered from all the people getting free epics from the BGs. Their only alternative is greatly outnumbering others in world pvp (which is possible) but why would you not farm up easy battlegrounds to gain an advantage if you care so much about pvp?

I think the argument suggesting that battlegrounds themselves are un-fun or bad for MMOs has been fairly well disproven by the majority and by the major success of MMOs such as WoW. There is plenty of reason to dislike instanced pvp without resorting to hyperbole of how terrible something is because you say so. Both open world and instance pvp have a place in MMOs.

The issue I believe is the difference in how pvp is rewarded and the entire pvp gear grind. It is a vicious grind circle that is really unfun to me. You need pvp gear to have an advantage over your opponents. But your same opponents are accumulating the same gear at the same rate. So you have to maximimize your gear-getting rate to get any sort of advantage over your opponent. So you have to use the MOST EFFECIENT WAY TO OBTAIN PVP GEAR. Which means you have to play instance battlegrounds, because the pvp rewards for open pvp are just non-existant.

So you are stuck competing and going head to head against people over and over again in these instanced battlegrounds. Is this because everyone plays nice in the battlegrounds and there's a significant reduction in open world pvp griefing and other things that players MIGHT stop subscribing over?

Either way... I blame the rewards systems and pvp gear grind before I blame the instanced pvp itself. SWTOR WZs were great fun until you started to get into the pvp gear grind. They need pvp for people who... just want to pvp.

Umm... I wish there was something like you describe. Xsyon comes to mind, although has a high entrance price for an indie game ($40 for one account). Minecraft is the only game (although non-MMO) that I can think of that can played multiplayer on the PC with fishing/farming/mining. 

Actually check out Wurm Online or Haven and Hearth... although I've heard PvP griefing horror stories. 

I wasn't expecting much out of Perpetuum, installed it with the full anticipation of it sitting in my pile of installed MMOs that I never play (STO, Champions, EQ, DCUO, Rift, WoW, etc.) amid some Betas that I had high expectations for, but ended up disappointed very quickly. 

But so far it's quite good. The best way to describe it is that it is EVE-light. I find it not nearly as complex as EVE, but similar enough to be compared to EVE. Really has been the only alternative to EVE that I have played. I would definately recommend this for anyone who is familiar with EVE, but never really got into the game for whatever reason (myself included).

I've started down my mining/indus path, although thinking about checking out the plant harvesting as well. I tried a bit of the combat, although not much.

I might try to convince my friends to get a trial account, but they are serious PvPers... does anyone have anything to say about the PvP in Perpetuum? It is difficult from the videos to tell if its mostly 2 robots circle-straffing eachother and what is pretty much a RNG or pre-determined winner. Or is it more like EVE where you travel in numbers and have more large-scale battles?

+1 for Perpetuum

Originally posted by gestalt11

I don't have a great definition of what is "hard" combat  I left it purposely vague because that state of the current definition and discussion.

 

So let me attempt a definition of "hard" RPG combat and see if people think it makes sense.  Combat in which success hinges upon either one or both of:

1) executing your moves with good timing in which you can make very few mistakes before you die.

      -and/or-

2) being involved, fairly regularly, in tactical situation where you must plan your sequence of moves ahead of time by roughly 10 or more moves and there are only a few out of the possibly 100s of possible combination that will see you survive.

 

Further you must regularly succeed at these in order to make significant progress (with or without save games).

With these definitions I would agree with people that the Dark Souls/Demons Souls line of games is the best recent game. Some of the difficulty lies in the action, but there is a significant amount to those games and are incredibly indepth for what items/weapons/armors/builds etc. can be chosen.

Here is an example from my days of playing Dark Souls:

Spending days fighting a single boss time and time again dying over and over (probably 2 hours a day for 3 days), eventually I "give up" and go online to see what I'm doing wrong and see that the boss is weak against a specific type of damage (in this case its bleeding dmg). I switch up to my weapon which deals bleed dmg (although weaker in other respects) and probably after another 30 minutes I still am unable to beat the boss. I go "farm" souls to get a few more levels to increase my health to better handle the boss' massive attacks (so I don't get 1shot basically) and finally go back to the boss and after 30 more minutes of attempts I am victorious.

I don't know if this scenario would fall into what you are asking about. But I definately rate Demons Souls and Dark Souls as "hard". But there is a decent amount of the game that can simply be overcome by twitch combat prowress and mob attack memorization. The "difficulty" in the Souls series is about learning from death.

**edit**

To push the point even further on your criteria... on death you lose 100% of the "souls" you earned which must be brought to a rest-point in order to spend them for leveling up. You can get the souls back you lost, but you have ONE chance to do so. Also in regards to saving, the game constantly saves the game, so there is no "saving" before the boss fight and loading it up afterwards, you fight all the way from the start, to the boss, and if you fail you have to do it ALL over again.  

Originally posted by pb1285n
Not only are you all over the place with your post, you seem to be purposely vague with your definition of "hard" so you could shoot down anyone's response to your post.

Just by the way an RPG is structured it's going to get easier the more you build your character. Unless you take out features that make it an RPG (levels, attributes, stat based equipment) or put restrictions to prevent people from out performing enemies (scaling enemy strength) anyone can turn the game into a grind rather then a challenge.

It's really all about how you approach an RPG that determines its difficulty, and your post makes it pretty apparent the type of gamer you are.

^ this

I was making a long response but ended up deleting it. The problem isn't that there's no hard RPGs, the problem is you are looking for chess-style difficulty in an RPG. Chess is a head-to-head competition between two players. RPGs in general are single player games that allow the "hero" to be much more powerful than the opponent. It would be like playing chess multiple times so you can level up and you get more queens than your opponent... it would make chess no longer difficult.

RPGs are difficult for all the reasons you mentioned that you would not consider difficult (figuring stuff out, action-based twitch combat, putting time in to become powerful).

The closest thing I've seen to an "RPG" that can be labled as "difficult" through your criteria is League of Legends, which isn't an RPG at all, but has RPG elements. 

Any rumors of pay2win usually send me packing... although this is increasingly becoming synonymous with every game with some sort of cash shop (ie players now saying GW2 is pay2win).... hyperbole much? 

Originally posted by Cuathon

I deem your argument incorrect because Fansy the Famous Bard. EQ>WoW.

^ this

EQ/UO gave people the ability to create their own awesome and memorable events. WoW's moments all felt sort of forced, that's not to say WoW had none, just I remember more from EQ/UO than I do from WoW. And I probably played EQ and WoW about the same amount. 

Oh and Fansy is awesome.

Ugh meant to edit and did quote, how do you delete posts?

RMT is a problem with me because I am cheap... I am really cheap... or as I like to say I am frugal. And given the option to NOT pay for content  I won't. And that puts me in a predicament... because I don't mind spending $15 a month for content, but when I am confronted with each and every purchase that may increase my enjoyment of a game I will 95% of the time say "NO WAY". 

I understand this is a psychological issue, and monetary-wise there may be no "meaningful" difference between paying $15 a month and paying for $3 worth of content every week. But microtransactions leave a sour taste in my mouth, and will often drive me away from a game with how cheap I am as a person. I have the money... I would just rather save it and play the game without paying, and eventually get frustrated because I don't want to have to pay for the smallest upgrade that would make the game more enjoyable...

Maybe I will get used to it down the road, but for now I can't bring myself to take part in the microtranscation game.