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

  1. #101
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dryr View Post
    The casuals are the majority of players in WoW (millions of subs). The "ideal" MMO that people seem to be asking for here tends to be heavy on the technical/crafting/novel-sized story aspects of MMOs and that would result in an MMO with the popularity of FFXI once again...

    I loved FFXI, but it really lacked the first "M" from MMO most of the time. If there are almost never MASSIVE numbers of people playing (without language barriers) paying a monthly fee to stagnate gets old.

    You can have a guild of hundreds of people to use as a community like FFXI. Then, you can interact with countless others anonymously for pugs and pvp if you want rather than having a server pop soo small that you learn half of the server's player names just because you all stand at the AH for hours trying to organize an activity.
    I have no problems with a population of that size, provided the game world isn't designed for 10,000 people to exist in every zone. I mean, seriously, we talk about WoW's population and somehow we get that mixed up with some belief that you as the player were literally interacting with millions of people in WoW. You may have interacted with potentially 2,000 people in total on your server. Seriously.

    The only people that should have problems with a well-designed world, that has plenty of activities to keep players busy through various means, but doesn't have millions of active subs, are developers themselves. We, as players, don't need that many people playing the game. It was once thought that having more players would equal more expansions, but that isn't true. WoW has always chugged along at its same pace in terms of content updates and expansions. I doubt that schedule would change whether there were 30 million or 300k people playing the game.

    So long as a server isn't struggling to fill slots for even the most basic events (like a ballista match constantly being canceled because 6 people for both teams can't be bothered to show up), total population figures are simply something for shareholders and the media to drool over. There has never been a MMO world designed for literal millions of players to exist on a single server, and there never will be. MUDS don't count. Text-based games don't count. Shitty graphic games that house "thousands" of players within a single vehicle don't count.

    Edit: I'll make this text big and bold so people that love "defined role" games can comprehend this: Defined roles are great until the developers of a game provide evidence that they have fuck all of an idea how to properly define the roles of a class within a game. Yes, defined roles were great when/if you were a bard, ninja, bard, red mage, bard, ranger, bard, black mage, or bard, but they weren't so very nice if you were a drg, cor, bst, thf, or drk. I only want to see defined roles when they are properly done, and even the word "properly" has a mixed connotation, as games like WoW, with large amounts of jobs, wound up tossing many of the defined roles across multiple classes, just to make sure nobody was sitting out in the dark while every other class got to have fun, which was the case with XI.

    Hell, SE still hasn't shown that it knows what the fuck to do with certain classes aside from granting them one decent ability and tossing everything else to the wolves with XI, and XIV isn't shaping up to be too much better at this point.

  2. #102
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    WoW never started off catering to casuals, anyone who played since Vanilla will tell you. When they noticed how popular it was they started dumbing it down to allow more people to get access to stuff. Best example is PvP, before you used to have ranks and at certain ranks you'd get titles, but the primary motivation to getting a higher rank and continuing to PvP was to hit the certain ranks to buy the blue and then eventually the epic PvP armor sets(was 8 and 15 iirc? Dont feel like looking it up), as well as doing battlegrounds to get your reputation higher there and being able to buy the gear they offered too. Not many people got high enough to get the epic sets, and it took a big grind to get there. Then they got rid of the ranking system overall and just added in honor and then arena points, so you don't really even have to dump a major timesink into PvP to get the epic gear, just enough as you go and you can eventually buy the sets.

    Alterac Valley change was also a way of dumbing down content and it ruined probably one of the most epic battlegrounds the game has ever had. People 'complained' about AV taking too long and not being able to finish it sometimes in a few hours. THAT WAS THE BEST FUCKING PART. It felt like an actual war, an actual battlefield where besides fighting the other faction you had all these different objectives that helped further your cause so even if you weren't 60 you were still of some use besides acting as bait for the enemy. If both sides were good and balanced, there was a stalemate until an opening presented itself. The Field of Strife was a giant mass of skeletons. Then they went and dumbed everything down and everyone pretty much rushes the first boss, and rides their way to the main area and finish the boss off for a quick win.

    Casuals may be the majority of WoW but alot of people I know who used to play it alot have stopped because they have just made the content unappealing for people who enjoyed the game as it was before. Most that are still there are just playing until something good finally comes out like GW2, Tera, etc.

  3. #103
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    I've seen people say here that they could never invest the amount of time into an MMO the way they used to again (i.e. playing FFXI 7 hours a day, everyday when it was your first MMO).

    What would everyone think about a game that was designed to be played 1-2 hours a day at the most, or maybe 2 to 3 four hour sessions a week? No event would last more than 2 hours. Most things would take 30-60 minutes to complete. A subscription system could complement this, such as 10 hours a week would be free and every additional 10 hours/week for $1.

    It seems this is what the ~30+ MMO gamers are asking for, but do you think it would end up being too casual? It would need a radical departure from normal skinner box/time sink design methods we currently see, which I see as a good thing personally. The biggest challenge would probably be for the designers create that epic feel we all love about MMO's in a game we're meant to play a bit less.

  4. #104
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    Ideally, I'd like to see a game that has maybe 2-3 "large events" each week not exceeding 3 hours each, and then something to do daily (an actual event, not daily quests) that would be expected to run about an hour. Other people have mentioned this too, but even though the time for marathon sessions everyday no longer exists, a game with a reason to log on outside of raid days for meaningful content is still desired. To use FFXI as an example, we had Dynamis a few times a week as a "large event" and things like Limbus that could be run in 30-60 minutes as smaller events. Of course, there was so much else to do that we all played way too much, but that's just a basic idea.

  5. #105
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    Quote Originally Posted by The Stig View Post
    There was an article a while back, where we were discussing MMO Design and someone linked it. I don't remember where it is now, but it basically started "If you try to make a WoW-killer, you've failed already."
    http://www.guildwars.com/events/trad...7/gcspeech.php

    I was just reading this again and trying to see how many "rules" TOR breaks. Obviously this isn't set in stone but i tend to agree with many points. Amazes me this was 5 years ago.

  6. #106

    "If you are aiming at a competitor rather than aiming to make something fresh and innovative, you've lost."

    Great line there.

  7. #107
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    The most important line in that article and probably the most relevant to the thread:

    "If you are starting today and don't have at least three years and $30 million dollars, consider developing in another genre"

  8. #108
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    The other side of that is, if you have 5 years and an unlimited budget, you can still mismanage the project to the ground.

    This is my favorite:
    ultimately the quality of a game is determined by the development culture that created it, and creating a successful MMO requires a radically different development culture than the culture optimized to produce traditional video games. While these large publishers have refined the process of creating traditional video games to an art, many of them have not yet realized that an MMO requires a completely different development process, and a studio culture to compliment that process.

  9. #109
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    Pretty sure that refers directly to SE! Bwahaha.

  10. #110

    Yeah, was gonna say Tanaka didn't get the memo.

  11. #111
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    Tbh, I see too many absolutes in this thread:
    1. Just because SE poorly balanced classes doesn't mean a class system is unmanageable and should be avoided at all cost.

    It'd just need to make a niche for all classes, and personally I think what many MMOs (and especially FFXI) lack is clever level design.

    For instance, imagine an event where you progress through a maze against the clock where:

    - A room is filled with strong but low/no-reward mobs, you need to cross it to reach a switch on the other side, your options are:
    a) kill them all, wasting time for no real reward.
    b) sneak by, but only a Rogue type class has the ability to do so.
    Of course, the sneaking has to involve actual skill (be it dexterity, intelligence or anything) from the Rogue player, not just be a "I'm a Rogue, instant success" thing.

    - Another room has a narrow entryway and as soon as someone gets in, that individual is trapped and weak but numerous mobs spawn. When all mobs die, the whole party is clear to proceed through it.
    You are warned of that fact and that room isn't the only path to the boss/next floor/reward chest/whateva.
    Your choices are:
    a) bypass the room and go for another path.
    b) send in a Warrior-type AoE-heavy class to run the gauntlet.
    Of course, the trick is twofold: keep the rest of the party busy while the Warrior clears the room and make the swarm challenging for the Warrior.


    Those are just crude examples, I know they're not perfect... the key is that at least there's an attempt to provide unique utility to the various classes in some events. As long as the attempt is there, it can be improved upon.

    Another point is to make sure there's an niche for a class before introducing it.
    That was one flaw of XI, classes were introduced by popular demand/need novelty for expansion pack.
    We didn't need SCH, such as class was always either going to be useless or obsolete one/several of WHM/BLM/RDM; we didn't need PUP with the mess that was SMN; we didn't need DNC; we didn't need BLU.
    COR's the only relevant post-Zilart addition and even then it wasn't handled that well.
    And we had too many melee DDs with insufficient side-utility to distinguish them.
    In some games, there's not enough to add flavour, in XI there were too many to balance.

    2. Just because HNMs (and even lesser NMs) were a mess doesn't mean a MMO should never have world spawns anymore.
    This plays a large part into the notion of playing "with or beside" people.
    As conflictual as the NM/HNM interactions could be, at least they were interactions... in a game where all content is instanced and you only meet others in hubs/PvP, it's easy to find yourself playing a "massively-single player online game".

    The problem with world spawns is always botting, of course... and I have no real solution.
    The claim system needs to be altered, but I can't think of a way that would retain competition while removing bots/cheating.


    3. A word on droprates. This is the part you're not meant to think about too much: MMO gear is pretty much designed to escape most people, yet have everyone yearn for it.
    A MMO player simultaneously wants "the best stuff" and doesn't want it (because when you have it, you stop running the content).

    That's the conundrum, and this one can't be solved. You can either have people moan about the droprates or moan about having done and obtained everything/everything relevant.

    That said, many droprates in XI were just insane. Having to run Dynamis for years to obtain full sets for 3-4 jobs is just insane, especially when you consider the relative suckiness of most (old) Dyna gear.
    By the end, I wasn't running Dyna for the gear anymore, I was running it out of LS loyalty (which sucked when leadership changed and a moron took over at the helm).

    Also, it's better to enforce rarity through difficulty than low droprates, but that comes with its own litany of moans.

    Maybe making droprates public would alleviate some issues, as well as publicising stats "X event has been beaten Y times, item Z was dropped Z' times, item Z'' was dropped Z'' times,... somewhere online.
    At least that way people could see whether to go for an item with low droprates in a relatively easy even vs another with much higher droprates but a very hard event.


    Quote Originally Posted by Greatguardian View Post
    The most important line in that article and probably the most relevant to the thread:

    "If you are starting today and don't have at least three years and $30 million dollars, consider developing in another genre"
    Very true, always makes me laugh when someone comes on a forum and claims he/she's going to make a MMO.
    Designing one as a thought experiment is one thing (that I'd recommend to all in this thread), actually developping it and commercialising it? Better have millions upon millions of €/$.

  12. #112
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    I think they spent about 5 bucks on Ragnarok and that did pretty well.

  13. #113
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    Very true, always makes me laugh when someone comes on a forum and claims he/she's going to make a MMO.
    Designing one as a thought experiment is one thing (that I'd recommend to all in this thread), actually developping it and commercialising it? Better have millions upon millions of €/$.
    I think Senoska was designing one? Lets go ask him if he has the requisites =p

    Thanks for linking that article, it's always a great read, and I can't believe it's in 2005! Somehow it stuck in my head all this time. Ok, I was a little wrong when I said it started with "making a WoW-killer = fail", it was half way down the article lol.

  14. #114
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rhyis. View Post
    I think they spent about 5 bucks on Ragnarok and that did pretty well.
    Because they realized the way to keep people playing is to include funny collectible hats. Look at TF2.

  15. #115
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    Then we may have found the key to success within the video game world. Go forth young game designers, make a Dune MMO!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Rhyis. View Post
    Then we may have found the key to success within the video game world. Go forth young game designers, make a Pokemon MMO!
    ftfy

    The online store can maybe sell Pokeballs. Doesn't impact gameplay, but when you pull your balls out for battle, other people will see it's a different design!

    3. A word on droprates. This is the part you're not meant to think about too much: MMO gear is pretty much designed to escape most people, yet have everyone yearn for it.
    A MMO player simultaneously wants "the best stuff" and doesn't want it (because when you have it, you stop running the content).

    That's the conundrum, and this one can't be solved. You can either have people moan about the droprates or moan about having done and obtained everything/everything relevant.

    Also, it's better to enforce rarity through difficulty than low droprates, but that comes with its own litany of moans.
    What's your view of currency/token based systems (in this case, points that drop from killing bosses)? I feel they overall work out quite nice. If the system keeps not putting out, you would have at least amassed some amount of points which can be used to purchase equivalent, or side upgrade like items, so your time would've not been in vain.

    SE somewhat had a solution, whether it was poorly implemented or not I'm unsure. That Neo Nyzul where you can kill a floor X boss a few times to get an item of choice on the next floor boss I felt was a generous system as given the time you can eventually get the drop you need.

    So here we have a system where we can moan about the drop rates but still eventually get what we want over time.

  17. #117
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    I realize there will always be a finite amount of content, but how about a focus on content that will be played because it's fun, and not because there's a .05% chance of getting rare boots

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    And then put .05% chance on those rare boots so that people keep running it after it ain't fun anymore.
    (That's pretty much the process now)

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    Drop rates should be linked to the amount of time investment the developer expects of the average player. This is done very poorly in most games, as you see very lucky players get what they want in a small amount of attempts, and then have almost no reason to revisit that content later. I'd imagine it's significantly easier to do the 0.05% drop rate than to actually build proper loot systems that reward players over the appropriate amount of time.

  20. #120

    The main difficulty of Developing an MMO now is pandering to everyone.

    I'll take SWTOR as my first example here, the game tried to be unique in its questing system, choose option A - good things & lightside points option b- bad things & darkside points and it did it well, but the problem with MMO gaming is that people who's only interest in the game is endgame missed out on all the story by spacebarring through all the conversations and picking whatever options they pleased to get to 50. When these players hit 50 after the first week or so the content that was there was no more interesting than any other current MMO title, you chose to either PvP or PvE.

    The PvE aspect of SWTOR at the begining was, hardmode flashpoints, and 3 tiers of raiding on 2 raid instances. Now in the beginning doing hardmode FP's sucked because going from straight 50 gear into HMFP's you struggled to beat enrage timers etc and were forced into doing PvP to get some purple gear upgrades to make your life easier. When you could complete these flashpoints and got a few pieces of gear, it became trivialized. What challenge is there in running something like the esseles in 20mins?. The same happened with the raids, you got enough gear to trivialise that current tier then jumped up a notch. now alot of guilds have completed atleast hard more if not nightmare mode.

    The PvP aspect of playing 3 maps endlessly became very tedious indeed, especially when they were 10-50 and there was no gating, there was no real challenge to PvP in SWTOR, pretty much everyone played the same 1 or 2 builds for each class. Trooper/BH spamming grav or missile, sages/sorcs spamming lightning etc. yes some challenge was added when the 50 only bracket was introduced but not much and the gear progression at that point was bad. random bags with a chance for dropping gear, and then nerfing the better gear drops for more tokens, which then drew out being competitve for newer 50s. Ultimately it got to the point that getting your battlemaster or war hero title is going to take you about a month worth of only doing your pvp daily quests.

    the open world pvp on ilum was another terrible implementation and a clear show of why factioning games dosn't work. being outnumbered 5-1 and having such bad framerates just made you want to kill yourself rather than go to ilum and ultimately why they have pretty much given up on it.

    the main problem of pandering makes things too easy and leads to alot of players quitting, its why i stopped playing swtor aside from many of the technical issues they had.

    I've seen people quoting FFXI here as a good model for an MMO, which i happen to disagree with. When i stopped playing it was a dinosaur in terms of gameplay and i'm not exactly sure how the game is now but i'll be using my views from the time i played.

    Leveling, there was nothing special about this, the grind was boring. Countless dunes deaths and a bad revival system did not make for fun gameplay especially at those levels. don't get me wrong i did enjoy good exp/merit parties but they come along so infrequently it just became a pain to sit around all day and potentially not get any experience or even lose experience while trying to perform a task. this isn't a useful system anymore and lets just hope it stays gone.

    PvP was practically non existent so there's not really much to talk about there.

    NM/HNM system, yes there is no thrill greater than getting the claim on that mob, facing it and defeating it. but the inevitability of it was if you didn't bot you didn't have a chance and the respawn timers could be silly. this to me is another archaic mechanic that shouldn't rear its head again, open world bosses are a good idea if they have certain triggers to them but a lotto on when they pop after a 20+ hour period is not helpful to anyone and not everyone will get a chance to experience it.

    BCNM's i actually thought were a good idea, taking on a specific fight for possible loot rewards after collecting enough tokens is a good way to add side grade or unique items to a game, it actually gave a purpose to going out and leveling another job for a chance at some of the items.

    Job system, again another feature i liked and was fairly unique to XI was the job system, the whole point of being able to switch to something else on the same character was a good idea in my book but the only thing that dampened it was having to level from 1 again on every class you wished to play as or needed to play as for leveling subs.

    And finally, Guild Wars 2.

    we've heard alot about getting rid of the holy trinity and the traditional questing system (postman/gatherer/hunter > talk to npc for reward) GW2 is trying to do something that current MMOs are shying away from, being unique.

    the original GW's main attraction was that it was designed to be balanced in both PVP & PVE, something that it did quite well, FotM builds existed and did get tuned when they became a bit too OP. but the combination of a combat system that restricted you to only 8 skills allowed that balance to be easily maintainable in PvP without hurting the PvE side of the game too much.

    GW2 carries on the legacy of being a PvP game, but now with a much sleeker PvE side to it, anyone who has played GW will tell you that tanking wasn't really possible and now they have gotten rid of the concept of tank/heal/damage being individual players and homogenized it, it now comes down to the player being responsible for their own well being rather than being an auto attacker. the holy trinity has disappeared and it brings something new to the table, something closer to the overall balance of merging both PVP & PVE together. I don't think i can truly say than any MMO has struck a balance between both aspects of PVP and PVE, and lets just hope that GW2 can bring something fresh to the MMO industry.

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