Then there’s the time issue.

I don’t have the luxury of playing an online game 2+ hours a day, reality occupies most of my time, so I can never see myself matching the people who play 5+ hours or more a day in a grinding game.

My first online MMORPG is Lineage. To this day there are still many playing, and one of the reasons is because of the grind factor. There is essentially no level cap, basically the cap is as long as you “live”, and consequences for dieing, upgrading, and even player-killing/pvp is huge (although penalties lessened over the years, it’s still very harsh imo).

I guess what I am trying to say is that what you are encouraging in essence for a more “sophisticated” game should not focus too much on the grinding content, rather the game should listen to and adapt to the gamers. The reason why WoW is so successful is because it caters to the masses- the masses can only dedicate so much time and energy (and money) to an online game. Through WoW’s success comes financial resources to further develop and include harder and more challenging content.

So many hyped up games failed on launch is because they simply tried to do too much and the average gamer can’t digest it, accompanied by poor management and chaotic subscription you have a disastrous game. My suggestion for upcoming MMOs is try to establish a player base that can understand the system without spending too much time in it. Once you have that player base, you can work from there- such as build a healthy gaming community, and before you know it, word of mouth will propel your game to the masses.

Basically gaming (especially MMOs/MUDS) have lost the whole risk/reward balance. You either have no real risk whatsoever, or risk that can only recovered from by HOURS of repetitive monster slaying. Best MUD I ever played you could lose your character taking a big risk, but if you didn’t die you got quite the reward.

In terms of Threshold, a better model would be to have say 1/10th a player level loss of XP for “normal” fights. But, have a higher death penalty for certain boss fights/areas that give far more xp/serious player competitions. Give skilled players the ability to gain an edge that doesn’t just involve investing more time into the game.

Guild Wars has already explored alternative ways of character development, like fancier skins, reputation systems and so on. I liked, despite all shortcomings, Ultima Online’s open ended point and training system the most out of all systems. You could retrain your swordsman to a bard or tamer, if you wished.

Darkfall is going to try something very similar. It is about time, the +10 level per expansion and the levevl system in general are tried and true, but flawed and I doubt it is the only way a meaningful MMO can be made.

Flying somewhere and cat steps on keyboard dismounting you?
Death.

Finish an epic fight of about 10 minutes that you really shouldn’t have been able to do on your own but you managed to anyway, and then something respawns or someone decides to gank you?
Death.

(In more rp based games)
Misread an NPC’s intentions because the obscure clues that were dropped only made sense to the dev and the three people he explained it to?
etc.

Death needs to be just enough of a deterrent to get you to want to do things right the first time, and circumstances should be flexible to allow different solutions, but sometimes the cat just steps on your keyboard. (Or your connection fails, I just like the image of the cat.)

I also have to disagree with your characterization of quests, though I think this might be because you went just a little too far in your critique induced enthusiasm : ). If you have a situation where you need to grind for something, I’d much rather be doing it finding out more about the game world or in such a way that it makes “sense” in some way for the character to be doing it. Going out and slaughtering one particular type of pig because it’s the easiest one to gain exp from kind of breaks my suspension of disbelief and investment in the game’s world.

These things said, I have to say that I pretty much agree with your other comments, and they would probably alleviate those issues I disagree with you on.

If content was not a grind, if the journey was as fun as the destination, or if you could go back and re-experience content scaled to your character’s abilities, then being totally set back by death or being totally unaffected by it wouldn’t really matter.

Similarly, in PvP, there is such an emphasis placed on gear grinds because the pure stats of items completely outweighs any skill. There is no way a person in greens in WoW will ever take out someone in purple. They may be terrible, walking into every trap you set for them, casting nukes right into your spell reflection, or whatever, but their stats win out.

It reminds me of the old board game Talisman, where you could reach a point where you just couldn’t physically be stopped by another player, no matter what they did. They just had to hope you ran into enough random encounters that automatically made you lose a life to reset you to a starting character. But in these MMOs/MUDs, that will never happen. And, practically speaking, you can never, ever catch up with them gear-wise unless you too invest the bajillion hours to get that gear in the same way. They kinda “deserve” an edge to warrant their work, but not so much as to twist incentives in the way they currently are.

I don’t really see any way to completely solve these problems for WoW and the games modeled off it, as they are structurally built in, as much fun as I had playing them.

A lot of the things you’ve said here relate so much to the other great posts you’ve made.

Interesting though, and I do agree that dying/coming back to life, especially in WoW, is too easy. People even deliberately die just to get closer to the location they wish to reach! Although I guess with todays ‘1 minute attention span’ generation it needs to be that way or games will lose players. It’s a double ended sword unfortunately…

Damn, in one game I play I’ve been stuck at the same level for multiple years. Is it frustrating? Yes. Do I still have fun playing? Yes. Why? Because there are many other enjoyable things to do in the game than level up. What will I do when I finally manage to get that next level? Whoop and holler!

“What’s that? A fighter murdered who? Okay, lets rally up and trap them in their guild hall, let them know we’re not to be messed with.” Now the fighters have to decide to turn one of their own over to the lynch mob outside, or sally out and fight, sneak a message and form an alliance with some other entity…and it goes on.

In the MUD I play now, there is no time (or incentive) to grind out levels unless you are really selfish or blind. Threats of invasion require all the players to work towards a goal. A plague near a civilized land causes a group of players to set up a research team, and compile all their findings. Church members have the potential to go Jihad on an opposed church. And that’s not even the thought of a scratch on the surface of the content in that game beyond your typical modern MMO.

All the while, the threat of Level and Gear loss is constant. You could call Threshold a hard game, but even though it’s hard, it’s incredibly fun. It’s not exactly newbie friendly in the current use of the term, but it is newbie supportive, it is designed well, and it does foster creativity.

When the game-world is dangerous, players will inevitably bond together. When players bond and groups are formed, player conflicts and hierarchies are equally inevitable. That plus involved developers, is what creates an online RPG with staying power, not bringing in massive amounts of players and trying to satisfy them all.

My favorite class by far was the enchanter. You want to talk about a difficult, challenging, and yet fun class to play, this was it. EQ 1 enchanter. In groups, they debuffed and were generally the main crowd control. Sometimes 1 enchanter would be keeping groups of 20+ mobs under control using various mesmerize, AE mesmerize, and AE stun spells simultaneously and strategically. That alone was more challenge than anything I’ve seen in WoW.

For me, the enchanter really shined when I played solo. I would do all of the above, in addition to my favorite spell: Charm. I would go into dungeons and charm some of the most dangerous monsters, buff them up with haste and +str and generally turned them into slaughtering machines. Then I would solo bosses meant to be killed by 5+ person groups. This was also done on a smaller scale for grinding and farming, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had playing any game.

What made it fun? Besides already being challenging for the reasons mentioned above, you also had to worry about the randomness of charm breaking unexpectedly. You then had 2 very angry monsters coming after you, one of whom is buffed out the ass by -you-. You had to react quickly and skillfully to get the battle going back your favor. Recreate EQ 1 with modern graphics, and there will be at least 1 guaranteed customer.