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Thread: The future of MMO's     submit to reddit submit to twitter

  1. #121
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    Heres my thing about content:

    If your MMO is P2P you better have content rolling out every three months, shit is unacceptable to have content on farm in 1-2 weeks with a 5 month wait for new shit to do. There is a serious problem when even casual players are blowing through new content in a week because they farmed it on the lowest difficulty setting. You would be surprised over the amount of people who don't care to do the same raid content on a higher difficulty setting.

    I like the way raid content was done in Ulduar where you made the fights as hard as you wanted by fulfilling a optional condition, those fights were tough for the times even when left alone. I would like to see fights be as hard as you want to make them, the harder you make it on yourself the better the loot is. Ulduar was very rough on most guilds, I think it was the most challenging raid in WoTLK even on normal. Back in Ulduar XT002 deconstructor was pretty hard before they crippled him with nerfs, Mimiron was a very challenging boss, Yogg-Saron was challenging as hell even on normal because so many things could go wrong.

    The Hodir fight was a perfect example, if you defeated him in x amount of time you got a special loot chest, in order to make the time-limit you had to really know how to exploit the NPC buffs, very little room for you to mess up and still make the time-limit. Once you failed to make the time-limit Hodir shattered the "special loot chest" and you get the normal loot for winning.

    You had a system where there was one difficulty with the option of making it even harder, with a optional boss that was very difficult for its time which was only up for 1hr a week, lots of guilds took a long time to clear Ulduar.

  2. #122
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    Quote Originally Posted by The Stig View Post
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  3. #123

    SE has a marvelous way of being the jackass genie. Ask for something? They may give it, but not how you expected. Neo Nyzul kill credits is the perfect example. I feel the 25 number is absurdly too high, but naturally you'll get the gear nazis defending it as if random Joe Blow on another server getting the same shit a little sooner somehow ruins their game. FFXI is pretty much the epitome of "have a clique or suffer" gaming right now. Some blame Abyssea for that, but I am quite certain it existed before that. More just had kiss ass and play nice in larger shells because it could be risky business trying limited content with low numbers or losing the benefits of more people just to claim a timed spawn.


    I let my Rift sub lapse today/yesterday because there was fuck all for me to as a non-raider. I try to bring up that people who play similarly to myself (basically an unreliable schedule not suited for strict raiid rules) do need gear progression options, and Trion actually had a system in place to allow such, but with their 1.8 patch pending, and with that a new raid and gear tier to go with it, the current options then fall two tiers behind, actually not being adequate in Hit/Focus/Toughness requirements if you wanted to even try the new raid. Trion themselves said they expect people who approach Infernal Dawn to basically have Hammerknell, the current T2 raid, on farm status. As many of us FFXI players should know, if you miss the initial benefits of a given piece of content, good fucking luck getting people to help you with it later. And with HK being a 20 man raid... yeah.

    Anyway, I expect those at present who have HK under their belts will be going on to ignore it once ID hits. You may have some scrub/partial progress guilds floating around here and there, but that doesn't solve personal player issues or even guarantee such guilds being a good fit for the individual. As a result, in the off chance a non-raider is presented with the opportunity to take a peek at the new content, they are useless/dead weight because they literally can't get to the minimum entry level requirements and people in the very conversation claimed they would kick people that perform poorly (and stat requirements are just plain part of that equation). I went on to try and ask people who'd done HK how quickly you could expect someone to go 11/11 in gear, start to finish, but got brushed off under the blanket assumption I just simply did not understand raiding and that you just can't look at things from start to finish and somehow time isn't a factor in determining whether or not an activity is casual or hardcore. With Greater Marks of Ascension being the currency to acquire HK gear, with items dropped within the instance itself to further upgrade those, it stands to reason that Trion did have a minimum period of time in mind when combined with the instance timer. Going on to cite the flaw people need to throw themselves at old content for 2+ months without adjustments (or "dumbing down" as they're so fond of) or alternatives just to go on and experience new flew right over their head. They love to prattle on about the "multiplayer" aspect of MMOs, but I find myself puzzled at endorsing practices of exclusion rather than inclusion to expand the possible pool of players you can group and play with.

    Anyway, my intent with the alternative gear was, with the arrival of 1.8, Inscribed Sourcestones dropped from various world events and some activities could be used to upgrade the current Planar armor, which is similar to T1 raid gear (Greenscale's Blight/River of Souls) to stuff similar to Hammerknell (T2). The raiders would still be a tier ahead, while those who don't but are currently gear capped within their means (like myself) don't have to wait indefinitely for gear that may never come. Ultimately, their only beef is people could gradually solo an item if they played enough. Current sets take at least 3500 IS with max fame/notoriety requirements with a couple factions for some pieces. The world events I mentioned give anywhere from 5-20 IS depending on the event itself and how active you are during their steps. There's maybe one an hour on a decently populated shard if you're lucky, and they can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to do (likely more complicated on PvP servers). It takes a long fucking time to buy the gear I mentioned, and if the next phase brought the total needed to double the current, I'd be okay with that. I don't find it ideal, but it's doable. The dreaded "dirty casuals" will still need their months, but it'll come at their own pace and not the whim of 19 others. And eventually they would be able to step into ID if they got the chance.

    Overall, it reminds me of how SE handled Voidwatch. Pimp a year of an event anyone can do as long as someone can at least pop the mob. Then introduce the final chapter where everyone winds up needing the ordered clears just to enter the final BCs. Achieving this may not be as difficult as getting HK geared, but it's still a painful process getting people to backtrack even if you try to form your own groups. There's little incentive for people who are done to backtrack even though the later tiers can give you items toward fighting the dragon. And while this system may sound okay for those who'd been around for the tier releases, I can only express sympathy to those who weren't and would like to get the crystal sword/staff, Meteor, or whatever else comes from the BCs.

    This is the first time in a while I haven't thrown a monthly fee at a game. While Aion going F2P may be a blessing given having a character in the low-50s from back in the day, playing it again has reminded me of why I quit. Aion can make the earlier mentioned IS grind seem tame in comparison, and it's certainly an unbalanced clusterfuck of classes.

  4. #124
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    As 1.2 does not appear to be the second coming, and it isn't going to reverse SWTOR's direction, is anyone else happy to see a game like that (incredibly derivative, over-hyped, massively under-delivered) fail because it is probably good for the MMO industry overall?

    To me, it looks like SWTOR might be the second largest failure in MMO's (the first of course is FFXIV). There are worse games with lower numbers of course, but nothing so large has failed so hard except for FFXIV. Should Bioware shut the game down and restart from beginning? Of course the game is playable, and is far better than FFXIV at launch, but they have to know that it is a massive disappointment at this point, and I am sure their long term projections for profitability have to have been changed. They have already give a MONTH of free play (and have even fucked THAT up), to get people to keep playing.

    I have to say that I am happy when awful money grabs like that fail. Now if I could just get people to stop buying Madden EVERY FUCKING YEAR, and the world might be a better place.

  5. #125
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    I can't call it a MMO failure, per say, but I can certainly call it a failure for EA, in that they either honestly believed or propped their shareholders/investors up to believing that a WoW clone with a Star Wars theme and a few snippets from Bioware's tired bag of tricks was going to somehow dominate the market. I believe that they will turn a profit in the end, but it won't be anything like what they had hoped for, and they'll have to shut down quite a few servers far faster than they wanted to. I may even go on record as saying that they might hit niche status faster than Rift did, and I'm sure Rift spent far less money making a more polished product.

    It is good to see, however, that much of what we talk about in this thread in terms of stagnation within the genre has been placed on full display with this SW MMO.

  6. #126
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    Star Wars theme and a few snippets from Bioware's tired bag of tricks
    only reason it hasn't completely failed. before launch several of my friends were like "YOU GOTTA GET THIS" and I was like "no thanks, it's just WoW in space", "BUT IT'S STAR WARS!!!11!"

  7. #127
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    The only reason I wish it didn't fail is because of the ridiculous amount of money behind this MMO. I'm not sure if they released the final investment dollars that they have into this thing, but I've heard figures of around $300M (if anyone knows anything more concrete than this please share). This is a good 10 times more than any other MMO has ever had for funding and will give investors a reason to think twice before investing in an MMO, which is certainly a bad thing.

    As far as your points Ringthree, you're absolutely right. This is a perfect example that development studios need to point to before they start on any new project.

  8. #128
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    You know, it's not like Blizzard coined the term "Release it when it's ready", and it is also not like Blizzard doesn't have issues with content post launch, but it just seems like so many in the MMO market think they can just launch shit games then fix them later? Do they just not see that a credible launch is the only way to build for the future, and that a smaller, good launch is much better than a huge, bad launch?

  9. #129
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    Quote Originally Posted by ringthree View Post
    As 1.2 does not appear to be the second coming, and it isn't going to reverse SWTOR's direction, is anyone else happy to see a game like that (incredibly derivative, over-hyped, massively under-delivered) fail because it is probably good for the MMO industry overall?

    To me, it looks like SWTOR might be the second largest failure in MMO's (the first of course is FFXIV). There are worse games with lower numbers of course, but nothing so large has failed so hard except for FFXIV. Should Bioware shut the game down and restart from beginning? Of course the game is playable, and is far better than FFXIV at launch, but they have to know that it is a massive disappointment at this point, and I am sure their long term projections for profitability have to have been changed. They have already give a MONTH of free play (and have even fucked THAT up), to get people to keep playing.

    I have to say that I am happy when awful money grabs like that fail. Now if I could just get people to stop buying Madden EVERY FUCKING YEAR, and the world might be a better place.
    Haha, hilarious that they spent a crazy amount of millions to clone a more story based WoW and it ended up being even more terrible than WoW itself.

  10. #130
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    Quote Originally Posted by Qalbert View Post
    only reason it hasn't completely failed. before launch several of my friends were like "YOU GOTTA GET THIS" and I was like "no thanks, it's just WoW in space", "BUT IT'S STAR WARS!!!11!"
    I wanted Death Star as a mount. When I learnt I can't have this, I said to my friends I will not play it.

  11. #131
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    I can't call it a MMO failure, per say, but I can certainly call it a failure for EA, in that they either honestly believed or propped their shareholders/investors up to believing that a WoW clone with a Star Wars theme and a few snippets from Bioware's tired bag of tricks was going to somehow dominate the market. I believe that they will turn a profit in the end, but it won't be anything like what they had hoped for, and they'll have to shut down quite a few servers far faster than they wanted to. I may even go on record as saying that they might hit niche status faster than Rift did, and I'm sure Rift spent far less money making a more polished product.

    It is good to see, however, that much of what we talk about in this thread in terms of stagnation within the genre has been placed on full display with this SW MMO.

    I think Bioware has lost all credibility as a company with SW:TOR, here you had a company basically taking every pop shot at Blizzard and other MMO's down to questioning their design philosophies and all they had to show for was:

    "The problem with MMO combat is that you often have scenarios of multiple heroes beating on a single target, that isn't very heroic." When they have the same raid model as WoW, in videos you see multiple people beating on some droid boss that seems to have two animations.

    "Within minutes of starting the game you will be doing things you wouldn't be doing in other MMO's." So tell me why am I killing 0/12 vermin or going here and collecting 0/8 of this? Just because theres a cutscene with people talking doesn't mean its any different.

    All of the abilities in the game look ripped from WoW and given a starwars theme.

    So basically all you have here is a company that lied about its innovation, didn't bring nearly as much innovation as they said they were. I mean lets get real, how many MMO gamers care about story compared to those who want good gameplay, nice loot system, balanced pvp and hard enough so the top few % can be special snowflakes? I bet most players just spammed spacebar through the cutscenes or lots of players found the voice acting scenes as a burden than cool.

    I go back to B.gate days with Bioware, when I look at SW:TOR i just see a big joke, I hope going forward when companies talk about innovations they don't pull a Bioware.

  12. #132
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    Quote Originally Posted by ringthree View Post
    is anyone else happy to see a game like that (incredibly derivative, over-hyped, massively under-delivered) fail because it is probably good for the MMO industry overall?
    No. I was quite pissed off with how Warhammer came out.

  13. #133
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    Quote Originally Posted by Qalbert View Post
    only reason it hasn't completely failed. before launch several of my friends were like "YOU GOTTA GET THIS" and I was like "no thanks, it's just WoW in space", "BUT IT'S STAR WARS!!!11!"
    I was close to picking it up one night out of boredom, but then I decided to play some old school RPGs to sate my thirst for sticking swords into fleshy things.

    I try not to be too overly-snarky, but I've never been a huge drinker of Bioware's Kool-Aid. I realize that they had some great titles in the past, but hell, SE had some of the best titles in the past, but it doesn't mean that we should run out and buy anything and everything they slap their name on. Between this and everyone jumping on ME3 (which I still haven't purchased, as I've had no desire to do anything that the game is selling, and I'd dislike all of my choices amounting to jack shit in the end under the pretense of "write your own story" anyway), its kind of nice to see the wind being kidney punched out of their sails.

    EA is EA, and the only part of EA I still support is the Maxis side (I will have my new Sim City, day one), and the old remnants of Westwood with Command and Conquers, but the rest of the company can shove it, really. It'll be nice to have people feeling that way about Bioware, because honestly, they deserve it. They allowed themselves to be assimilated and subsequently whored out by EA for a few extra cars for their higher-ups, and this is the result. You can put a conversation wheel on a pile of shit but it won't make it smell nice, and thank goodness that people are starting to wise up to it.

  14. #134

    Maybe it was just me and D&D rule sets not clicking, but I couldn't really get into BioWare back when they did Neverwinter Nights and didn't bother following them since. In general, I want to say games that try to pass off the "write your own story" are a farce since you truly are limited to options a dev decided to code and too often a singularly potential strong plot winds up getting diluted and weakened when attempting to multi-thread some kind of good/evil/neutral dynamic instead.

    But yeah, I'm okay with bigger companies getting kicked in the nuts now and then. For all the talk of MMOs specifically in this thread, I'm not really fond of how many going about applying DLC with launching incomplete games or grossly overpriced fluff.

  15. #135
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    I have thought about this topic before, and it seems like most MMO players have. For the obvious reason that it's clear to everyone there are very serious problems for the genre to confront and improve on.

    Thinking about the current field of MMO's I can't help but think about this years Republican race for candidacy. Everyone is sick of the way things are. They want things to change for the better. They go looking at the field of possibilities. Each new candidate is given a shot and looked at in detail. At first they might look good, but once you really see what's going on you realize they aren't much different. In the end you just wind up with a slightly different flavor of the status quo.

    Right now there's nothing much out there but the MMO equivalence of Romney. WoW clones with different styles or a sliver of ingenuity.


    More fundamentally the more I think about the whole idea of a Massively Multiplayer RPG, the more I think it's an inherently bad idea. Specifically the "massively" aspect. IF a game is going to house thousands of people, it can't escape a lot of the bad effects I think most MMO players are sick of. Such as:
    *long wait times for doing large group events
    *all the time-sensitive issues when scheduling and not wanting to waste people's precious free time.
    *jerks who feel more empowered to be rude and careless because they can be an anonymous face on the internet with thousands of others.
    *large virtual economies

    And so to pull all the way back to basics this is the question: why *should* you want to be hassled with bringing in thousands of other people as a hugely complicating factor in your gaming experience? What good things could an MMO offer me that another game can't? I won't give money to any MMO unless it convinces me of that much.

  16. #136

    I know I might get flamed for this but you really need to take a look at guild wars 2, every single thing you have placed on that list have been addressed in some form or another.

  17. #137
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    GW2 is going to be a step in the right direction, not the end goal. Its going to take a long time for us to get where we feel we need to be, but GW2 is going to be a fun journey, to say the least. TERA is going to fufill my love of structure in a MMO, as I'll be constantly working with guildmates for a common goal. GW2 is going to fufill my love of freedom in a MMO, where I'm free to help anyone I want, for any reason I want, and get rewarded for it. I've been waiting for a game that does this for a long, long time; it goes all the way back to sitting in Valkurm dunes with Full Drg AF2 back in 2006, waiting for lowbies to call for help so I could one-shot jump the mobs and inspire the next generation of Drgs, as a mentor of my own did for me years earlier.

  18. #138

    That's partially why I'm looking forward to Diablo III, knowing what I did with Diablo II. Disregarding the need of a monthly fee, you're not readily subject to the whims of thousands of other players. At most, it's 8 people ideally cooperating with the objective of killing monsters before you. Without the persistence of a game world, you eliminate things like timed spawns (be it mobs or resource nodes) and basically equalize everyone with fixed spawns (think Pindleskin always at the entrance of Nihlathak's Temple) and then the random spawns if you choose to explore a map. Granted, D2 faulted in favoring drop rates on fixed mobs over random thanks in part to treasure class assignments, but I think it's something Blizzard took to heart when it comes to Inferno difficulty in D3. Though, the actual difficulty there is still an unknown.

    D3's economy may be another matter, particularly with the introduction of the RMAH. Those not looking to participate in that are probably going to have a harder time finding rarer, more worthwhile goods. Part of me hopes the "gold only" crowd winds up being more generous in the selling and sharing of loot, but I also fear painfully excessive bloat that could leave a new player suffering if they join the game later on where what they do find in their juvenile stages isn't worth much or even wanted.

    I just feel like some get too caught up in the "massively" portion of the MMO moniker. Possible hundreds of people in dozens of different zones don't really benefit me as a player. The presence of people only matters when it comes time to needing others and getting said people together swiftly. To that end, lobbying or intuitive matchmaking services can be better serving, but you'll always have those who want to "whine" about a world not feeling like a world because they don't see some random joe in the middle of nowhere that they'd just ignore (or compete with) as they're running to their own personal objective, anyway. Meanwhile, while I can understand the concept of servers breaking up populations so limited resources aren't as throttled, when they prevent people who have mutual needs from getting together, it is problematic. I liked Aion's concept of "Channels" in this respect, but they still had servers where paying to transfer is required. Other games offer similar, but I give Rift props for allowing free server transfers once a week to better help people "find their place" if you will.

    Anyway, I know I enjoy my anonymity in the sense I don't want to be harassed by players of poorer social disposition, but I also want to say the internet has a higher responsibility in not condoning and better policing problematic behaviors (be it from 12 year olds or those 30+ who make you think they're 12). I don't like Blizzard's RealID system because some casual net game buddies don't need to know my name (unless they have a hot sister they can hook me up with ). It can also take a later disagreement or deliberate deception to get that info and misuse it with the collective internet info that's building out there, even if it's as simple as Google Earth and street viewing someone's house. And while I don't wanna go all "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" with this, some are just too trusting or don't know better with regards to (mandatory) RL info.

    Anyway, need to scoot for a bit. x.x

  19. #139
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    MMO companies need to stop talking about innovation and start doing it. We saw Bioware shit-talk about everyone else for a couple of years about how everyone else is doing it wrong, how they were going to be trend setters. The main problem that is MMO's these days have a plethora of issues that I can't honestly see how the genre can be awesome again.

    * We have MMO's launching with terrible bugs, giving players a terrible experience.
    * We have companies that skimped on the endgame content when getting to the level cap takes 1-2 weeks.
    * We have faction imbalances galore.
    * Trying to cater to everyone which is impossible.
    * Pvp thats absolutely broken.
    * Becoming more and more automated rather than having to interact with players.

    All these games went from offering this epic experience, the progression of a players struggle in this big mysterious world that required forging friendships to overcome challenges to Cash grabbing. Now we see MMO's offering a watered down experience, everyone is a winner because you can faceroll everything on easy difficulty. The lush game world that used to matter is only used for leveling then its raid after raid until the next patch. Since everyone is a winner you now have to weed through more terrible players than ever should you want to do some of the harder content.

    I'm not saying we need 3-5 months time to reach level cap, I'm saying that if you're a MMO company and people can reach level cap in a few weeks, you better have the content to support them for at least three months out. Quit making MMO's where everyone wins, it cheapens the experience that these games are supposed to bring. The game world should always matter, there needs to be reasons to be out and about other than waiting for raid cooldowns to reset or playing through them again on alts.

  20. #140
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    Needs more ganking imo.

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